Teaching Trends
A Guide for the Perturbed
Michael Ostling
“The purpose of education is to turn tangible resources
into intangible resources. If we cannot measure what is
valuable, we will come to value what is measurable, so
that passion for measurement can distort organizational
efforts by prizing and overproducing what can be
measured and neglecting what cannot.”
—Robert Birnbaum
Management Fads in Higher Education
© Michael Ostling
2013
“Teaching Trends” was commissioned
by the Philosophy and Religion Department,
Central Michigan University. However, ideas and opinions
expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily
reflect the views of that department or university.
Who’s Perturbed?
Most teachers teach well, but we could teach even better. So we re-jig
our syllabi, attend workshops and round-tables and conferences, trade
ideas with colleagues, browse selectively in the vast fields of research on
teaching and learning. However, our limited resources of time and
energy are already over-taxed with research, with service—and of course
with teaching. It sometimes seems that we are too busy teaching to learn
how to improve.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves under pressure from departments, from
administrators, from legislators and parents to adopt ever new
approaches and techniques. Some of these seem like good ideas (but
might not be), others we eye (perhaps wrongly) with suspicion: many
appear to reinvent the wheel. The blogosphere broils with talk of
revolutions in higher education—revolutions proclaimed with
evangelical zeal or decried in apocalyptic tones. Teachers can find it
difficult to engage (or to resist) bodies of research at least as vast and as
fractious as our own areas of research expertise. We don’t have time to
become experts in the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL), and
yet its findings are lastingly relevant to our professional lives.
This Guide is written for ordinary teachers like myself who wish to
understand recent trends in teaching on a limited budget of time. It is
written for all of us who are perturbed—both excited and worried—by
the promise or the threat of the hottest fad, the latest revolution, the
newest teaching technology. And it is intended to help give a voice to
teachers—but also to departments, faculty associations, unions, and
grass-roots movements—who suspect that many changes to higher
education are less beneficial and less inevitable than their media
presentation suggest, but who lack the language to critique such change
without appearing hide-bound or reactionary. We want to innovate
cautiously, taking what is best from the newest trends while avoiding
potential pitfalls.
Teaching Trends does not attempt original scholarship. Instead, it
provides a window onto the vast and quick-changing field of SoTL—a
window that, inevitably, implies a specific viewpoint. I have tried to be
fair and dispassionate in surveying this contentious field, but have not
found it useful to suppress my own opinions. Instead, the writing of this
report has furnished me the opportunity to attempt the discernment of
good change: adopting what Robert Birnbaum calls a “skeptical
curiosity” toward innovations in higher education, resisting fads while
taking from them whatever is useful. Readers who wish to indulge their
own skeptical curiosity are referred to the References and Resources
section, with its thematically arranged list of readings and links.
1
Contents
List of Figures .................................. 2
1. What’s Going On? ....................... 2
2. What is College For? ................... 4
3. Problems and Prospects ............. 7
3.1: The Learning Paradigm ...... 8
3.2: The Assessment
Movement ......................... 9
3.3: Digital Natives .................. 11
3.4: Flipping the Lecture ......... 12
3.5: MOOCs and Similar .......... 13
4. What Can Teachers Do?............ 14
4.1: Psychology of Education .. 15
4.2: Student Metacognition .... 17
4.3: Group Work ..................... 19
4.4: Reading and Writing ........ 20
4.5: Academic Self-Efficacy ..... 21
5. What Can Institutions Do? ....... 23
5.1: The Liberal Arts ................ 23
5.2: Class Sizes......................... 24
5.3: Innovative Teaching ......... 25
5.4: Rigorous Teaching ............ 26
5.5: Engaging Assessment ....... 27
5.6: Skeptical Curiosity ............ 28
6. What Now? ............................... 30
7. References and Resources ........ 33
Acknowledgements ..........back page
1. What’s Going On?
Figures &cetera
Figures
Figure 2.1: College Competencies ... 6
Figure 2.2: What College is For ....... 7
Figure 3.1: The Fad Test .................. 7
We teach in an age of academic apocalyptic. Universities are in crisis.
Economic, political, administrative, generational, and intellectual factors
have come together in what Thomas H. Benton calls a “perfect storm”
for higher education (Benton 2011). Though I will want to question
some of the supposed factors contributing to this alleged storm in the
pages below, it might be useful to start by cataloguing the more
prevalent complaints:

Students arrive at college full of confidence but short on ability,
woefully unprepared for college-level work. Kids these days are
multitaskers, digitized web-surfers, plugged in but tuned out. They
don’t read.

An emphasis on retention renders teachers nearly powerless to
enforce high standards of reading, writing, or analysis. Student
evaluations of teaching (SET) encourage the disengagement compact
between students and teachers. We “expect little, smile a lot, gesture
freely […]. Professors pretend to teach, students pretend to learn”
(Benton 2011).

Contingent or adjunct teachers, who now comprise over half the
teachers at US colleges, are especially vulnerable to SET scores,
driving up grade inflation. Adjunct faculty are also buried under
course loads that make rigorous instruction impossible (Deresiewicz
2011).

Students (and their parents) approach college as consumers: they
understand themselves to be purchasing a passing grade and a
diploma. Learning is incidental to this project.

The price of a diploma has, however, risen precipitously. Despite the
cost-savings represented by contingent faculty, large class sizes, and
online education, tuition continues to soar: for public universities it
has risen from about 18% of a median-income family’s annual budget
in 1999 to 25% in 2007 (Deresiewicz 2011). Meanwhile state funding
of public education has decreased from about 75% of college budgets
in the 1970s to 25% or less today (Fish 2008: 155).

To pay for this, student loan debt has reached an astonishing $830
billion nationally, exceeding credit-card debt and placing many
students under crushing financial burdens (Gillen 2010). But the
degrees so dearly bought no longer guarantee a good job—they don’t
even guarantee that graduates will be prepared for entry-level skilled
work of any kind (Casner-Lotto, Barrington, & Wright 2006).
Figure 5.1: The CLA Task ............... 27
Figure 5.2: Raising Standards ........ 29
Figure 6.1: The A-Box Fallacy ........ 31
Mini-Reviews
Academically Adrift ......................... 3
College: ........................................... 5
Management Fads .......................... 8
“Does Quality Matter?” ................ 10
Clickers .......................................... 12
What the Best College Teachers Do
and Tools for Teaching............ 15
Mindset ......................................... 17
Colleges That Change Lives ........... 24
The Courage to Teach ................... 32
Adaptable Assignments
Relationships................................. 18
Unplugging .................................... 19
Reading Questions ........................ 20
Writing to Learn ............................ 21
The Open Creative Project ............ 22
2
One could continue, touching on bloated athletic
programs, the deleterious effects for teaching of the
“publish or perish” culture, administrative
centralization and over-reach (or, conversely, faculty
recalcitrance in the face of much needed teaching
reforms). Not everyone agrees on what is wrong with
college, but everyone seems to agree that a great deal
is indeed wrong. Book-length critiques of American
colleges have been a publishing staple for decades,
but the last five years have seen a bumper crop, from
every political position and from both inside and
outside the ivory tower: Crisis on Campus, Unmaking
the Public University, How Colleges Are Wasting Our
Money and Failing Our Kids, Losing Our Minds, Why
You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,
Academically Adrift (Deresiewicz 2011 provides a
balanced review of several of these; see also Rhode
2006 for a historical survey of the genre). All of these
books find college today to be in a state of
unprecedented crisis. Most also propose solutions,
tinged golden with nostalgia for an imagined perfect
past or with rapturous visions of future potential.
The calls for reform which characterize this vast and
contentious literature are both useful and dangerous.
Useful in demonstrating that the decisions of
individual teachers, of departments and programs,
and of whole institutions do make a difference: one
can adopt approaches and policies that really help the
“kids these days” learn better and more. Dangerous,
in that the rhetoric of reform can easily shade over
into apocalyptic tones (“disruption” in the current
jargon): to a call for radical measures where “the first
shall be last and the last shall be first.” Institutional
inattention to substantial learning outcomes “makes
discussion of higher education’s accountability both
largely inevitable and in certain respects warranted”
(Arum & Roksa 2011: 18-19). Although Arum and
Roksa are themselves skeptical of externally imposed
accountability systems, their Academically Adrift (see
also Mini-Review 1.1) has become a stick with which
to beat higher education, to advocate for fast,
sweeping change to academic culture, often at the
expense of academic freedom and faculty autonomy
(Brooks 2012; Vyse 2012). In the apocalyptic mode, it
is easy to deride those who question sweeping change
3
Mini-Review
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
Academically Adrift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Perhaps the most statistics-laden best-seller of 2011,
Academically Adrift sounds a call to arms for teachers concerned
about the state of learning in college today. Based on a
longitudinal study of 2,322 students at 24 four-year colleges
chosen for maximal institutional diversity, the book correlates
student behaviors, faculty culture, and administrative policies
with the “value added” of college: increased critical thinking and
writing skills. Their central finding: students aren’t learning much
in college today.
Some of the juicier details outlining this lack of learning have
garnered the bulk of media attention:

Students spend less than 12 hours per week studying on
average, and more than a third of students study less than
5 hours per week. “Study” includes all out-of-class schoolwork: problem sets, writing assignments, research, reading
the textbook, exam review.

Despite this lack of study, 85% of students enjoy a GPA of
B- or better; 55% have a GPA of B+ or better.

50% of sophomores had never taken a course requiring 20
pages of writing over the semester, and about 1/3 had
never been assigned 40 pages or more of reading per week.

Using the College Learning Assessment (CLA), Arum and
Roksa “observed no statistically significant gains in critical
thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills for at least
45% of the student in our study” between entering college
and the end of sophomore year. 36% showed no significant
improvement over four years (36).
Arum and Roksa’s suggested solutions to the problems they
outline have received less attention. Despite their gloomy
findings, Academically Adrift is a surprisingly hopeful book.
Reading assignments, writing assignments, study alone, high
faculty expectations and frequent faculty contact all correlate
strongly with higher CLA performance; and this remains true
when adjusted for the socioeconomic background and college
preparedness of incoming students. In other words: college can
improve critical thinking and complex reasoning skills—if we
make such improvement a priority.
Note: Research addenda and follow-up reports can
be found at http://highered.ssrc.org/ .
For an ethnographic account of “academic drift” from the
student side, see My Freshman Year (Nathan 2006).
as luddites, as hide-bound conservatives or knee-jerk liberals as the argument serves: as instantiations of
Cornford’s first law of academe, “Nothing should ever be done for the first time” (quoted after Delbanco
2012a: B8). But frustrating though such resistance can be, it is important: especially in that seemingly
innovative solutions so often turn out to be trends less grounded in good research than they inevitably
claim. There can be a tendency among both reformers and those who resist reform to shoot first and ask
questions later. If we don’t deliberate carefully about our teaching aims, we are likely to do some
damage.
Two brief anecdotes might illustrate this initial problem: that we should figure out what is wrong with
teaching and learning in higher education before we try to fix it:
 The “Millennial Generation” formed a recurrent theme at the Great Lakes Conference on Teaching
and Learning held at Central Michigan University in May of 2012. Presentations had titles such as
“Challenges of Engaging 21st Century Students,” “Reaching Today’s Learner,” “Today’s Visually
Oriented Students,” “Communicating with 21st Century Learners”, even “Postmodern Probes about
Millennial Students.” All these (and several more) assumed that there exists such a thing as the
Millennial Generation or the 21st-Century Learner, and that this creature requires different teaching
approaches than those currently on offer. However, the jury is still out on the Millennials: whether
they are the best generation (Howe & Strauss 2000) or the dumbest generation (Bauerlein 2008) or
the saddest generation (Twenge 2006)—or even whether the generalizations made about them
amount to more than pseudoscience (Hoover 2009). In other words, the GLC expended a great deal
of pedagogic energy on approaches to teaching a “generation” whose very existence is in doubt.
 Many of these same presentations assumed that today’s student is a “digital native,” a tech-savvy
NetGen web-surfer constantly plugged in to multiple streams of digitized text, sound, and image.
And yet recent studies suggest that not every student is digitally native, that even today, many
students especially at open-enrollment universities grew up with limited interaction with the
Internet; that most use technology for entertainment purposes but don’t necessarily know how to use
it for business or educational purposes—that the “tech-savvy” student is a myth (Cowan 2011;
Hargittai 2010; Tanner 2011).
I’ll return to these issues in Section 3.2 below. The point for now—a central contention of this Guide—
is that we should exercise caution and judgment before embracing solutions to the crisis of learning in
higher education. Its causes and solutions are far from clear, and some proposed cures might be worse
than the ailment. Our problem is thus one of discernment (as it so often is in apocalyptic situations—see
Matt. 24: 10-12). The present essay does not pretend to provide that discernment, but it might help
untangle at least some of the issues confronting college teachers today.
2. What is College For?
Robert Birnbaum singles out “the degradation of the narrative” as the central problem facing higher
education today. Without narratives providing meaning and purpose to the academic endeavor—
narratives outlining the university’s role in fostering such ends as personal growth, civic participation,
critical thought, or liberation from superstition and error—the university falls prey to technocratic or
consumerist evaluations. The key questions come to center around cost-effectiveness, job training, or
graduation rates (Birnbaum 2001: 226).
4
It is neither likely nor desirable that college teachers (still less their
students, those students’ parents, or American society as a whole) can
find a consensus narrative for higher education. But without some
general notions of what college ought to be for, more specific questions
of teaching approach and technique lack a point: how one should teach, as
much as what one should teach, are questions intimately related to such
larger issues as the nature of higher education itself. This section briefly
considers some of the options.
For many students, the aim of college is what you get at the end: a
diploma. Such a credentialist view of college can be understood using
either of two models: the “sieve” and the “ticket.” If higher education is a
sieve, students are understood to arrive at college with innate abilities
and predispositions. School acts to detect these abilities through filtering
mechanisms such as assignments and exams. School thereby sorts the
sheep from the goats, the smart from the dumb, the capable from the
incompetent: testing, not teaching, lies at the center of the college
enterprise, and those who pass muster are rewarded with high-paying
and prestigious careers (Arum & Roksa 2011: 91-92). The “ticket” model
looks to such material rewards and understands the goal of college as
providing access to these. A student may not have the innate abilities
that college is intended to detect and reward, but this hardly matters: if
he or she can game the system, trick or cajole the institution into issuing
a diploma, then they will have got into the elite club that is, from this
perspective, the point of college.
These two credentialist models are united in their instrumental attitude
toward college: it is all about the goal, not the journey of learning. Many
students, aware that they aren’t learning much, nevertheless prefer “any
class where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or
something like that” (a Midwestern college undergraduate, quoted in
Arum & Roksa 2011: 4). Under a credentialist model, students attempt to
“acquire the greatest exchange value [good grades and a degree] for the
smallest investment of time and energy” (Arum & Roksa 2011: 16).
Parents often concur, advising their children to get through, get out, and
begin enjoying the fruits of a degree (if not of an education) as quickly
and cheaply as possible. A predictable result, especially when combined
with faculty research pressures: what George Kuh calls a
“disengagement compact’ between teachers and students. “‘I’ll leave you
alone if you leave me alone.’ That is, I won’t make you work too hard
(read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or
explain why you are not performing well” (Kuh 2003: 28).
For anyone serious about teaching and learning, college is not about
such external markers as a diploma but about internal changes in the
student. The learning outcomes or “value-added” of college consists, at
minimum, in knowledge gained: mastery achieved over a discipline or
5
Mini-Review
Andrew Delbanco
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.
Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012.
In the face of political, technological, and
economic threats to higher education,
Delbanco worries that America’s greatest
invention is at risk. In his long perspective
(beginning in Plato’s original grove of
Akademe), Delbanco rightly sees the
American college as something unique—
a place both democratic and elite, a site
of critical thought but also for coming of
age and for second chances. The “lateral
learning” characteristic of American
college finds its source in colonial Puritan
convictions that the the elect enjoy an
“aptness to edifie [one] another” (56).
Delbanco explores the democratization
of this “aptness,” from the Land Grant
universities through the GI Bill and the
influx of women and minorities into
college. And he chronicles the recent
dismantling of this democratic ideal: the
liberal arts retreating to prohibitively
expensive elite colleges; technology
fragmenting the self-formation college
once helped to foster; critics of every
political stripe reducing college to the
vocational training of a productive
workforce in a knowledge economy. “It is
a pipe dream to imagine that every
student can have the sort of experience
that our richest colleges, at their best,
provide,” writes Delbanco. “But it is a
nightmare society that affords the
chance to learn and grow only to the
wealthy, brilliant, and lucky few” (7). Of
the many recent defences of the liberal
arts, Delbanco’s is among the most cleareyed and persuasive.
Note: a taste of Delbanco’s argument can
be sampled in his CHE article, “College at
Risk” (Delbanco 2012a).
Figure 2.1
College Competencies
In addition to the content-mastery and specialized skills associated
with a student’s choice of discipline, students should leave college
having achieved:

field—a major. Beyond this minimal goal, most
commentators hope students will gain new
behaviors, dispositions, skills, appreciations: the
range of competencies usually understood to be
gained, or at least aimed for, through the liberal arts
or general education curriculum. Figure 2.1
summarizes a typical list of such competencies.
Personal competencies: self-motivation, moral reasoning,
analysis, quantitative reasoning, problem-solving
Not every commentator would sign off on this full
list. Against Arum and Roksa’s worry that today’s
 Communicative competencies: writing, listening, public
speaking, information technology
student “drifts” through college without aim or
purpose, Andrew Delbanco considers a certain degree
 Organizational competencies: leadership, management,
interpersonal skills
of drift to be both traditional and salutary for
American higher education, setting our universities
 Cultural competencies: knowledge of other cultures, tolerance
for diversity, informed civic and democratic participation
apart from the early specialization (and its potential
for rigidity and social stratification) of European
 Substantive competencies: a basic grounding in the natural
sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts
educational models. College should be above all “an
Adapted from Rhode 2006: 65, who summarizes a rough consensus
aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young
drawn from several recent books and articles.
people take stock of their talents and passions”
(Delbanco 2012b: 15-16; cf. Attewell 2011: 225). In
contrast Arum and Roksa, who sometimes seem to
equate “learning” with “increase in scores on the
Collegiate Learning Assessment,” tend to disregard the penumbra of important college outcomes not
measured by the CLA: interpersonal skills, self-discovery, civic and democratic participation. Taking a
provocatively extreme position, Stanley Fish would balk at both Delbanco’s self-discovery and the
implicit instrumentalism of Academically Adrift. In his Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish portrays a
liberal arts education as gloriously useless (more precisely, he asserts that its use, like that of a poem, is
self-contained: it justifies itself in its own terms). And he lampoons the language of college mission
statements, with their lofty goals of “fostering an appreciation for diversity” (Wesleyan); “developing
moral, civic, and creative capacities” (Yale), in order to “produce an effective and productive citizen”
(MSU) (Fish 2008: 10-12, 52-53). In their place, Fish proposes a “deflationary” purpose for college
teaching: it should “introduce bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry [and] equip students with
the analytical skills necessary” to investigate these bodies of knowledge both in class and independently.
Any additional mission, Fish proclaims, is inappropriate, impossible, or both (Fish 2008: 12-13; cf.
Gardner 2005: 108).
And yet the distance between Fish’s formulation and those of Rhode, Arum and Roksa, or Delbanco is
less than it first appears. Although Fish finds the term “critical thinking” to be empty (54), his
“analytical skills” would encompass any standard definition of critical thinking—as well as the complex
reasoning, problem solving and writing measured by the CLA and emphasized by Arum and Roksa. And
surely there is some overlap between the intellectual virtues Fish espouses—“thoroughness,
perseverance, intellectual honesty, […] conscientiousness in pursuit of truth” (20)—and the civic,
democratic, and Socratic virtues championed by Delbanco. Indeed, despite some terminological quibbles,
nearly all commentators agree that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are central to
higher education (Arum & Roksa 2011: 108; Rhode 2006: 66).
6
Prospective employers concur: according to several
recent national surveys, today’s corporation seeks a
college-educated workforce proficient in critical
thinking, complex problem solving, and written and
oral communication (Casner-Lotto, et al. 2006: 9;
AAC&U 2013; Sternberg 2013). These same surveys
find that colleges are not doing their job. 93% of
employers consider “written communication” to be
“very important” in entry-level college-educated
employees; but they find 28% of those graduates
“deficient” in this skill. College graduates fair a little
better in “critical thinking”—just 9% are deficient,
but only 28% are excellent in this supposedly central
capacity of higher education (Casner-Lotto, et al.
2006: 20-34; see also Gardner 2005: 65). The
credentialist students who think they’ve got their
career-ticket punched when they graduate often
discover that employers ignore their diploma and
their grades—focusing instead on the critical
thinking and writing competencies these students
failed to gain in their rush through college (Arum,
Cho, Kim, & Roksa 2012).
Figure 2.2
What Is College For (According to Employers)?
According to a 2013 survey private businesses and non-profits, over
75% of employers seek the following in their college-educated
employees:

Critical thinking

Complex problem-solving

Written and oral communication

Ethical judgment and integrity

Intercultural skills

A capacity for continued new learning

Applied knowledge in real-world settings
This list of employer-desired college outcomes may be usefully
compared with the “College Competencies” outlined in Figure 2.1
Adapted from AAC&U, “It Takes More than a Major,” 2013.
In what follows, I will take Fish’s minimal mission for higher education as the basis for evaluating
teaching trends, while keeping in mind that both the substantive and analytical mastery he advocates
imply those wider competencies of critical thinking and clear writing advocated by Arum, Roksa, and
the employers of America.
3. Problems and Prospects
Figure 3.1
The Fad Test
In Section 1, I suggested that critiques of higher
education often resemble the genre of apocalyptic,
with its characteristic polarization, black-and-white
us-vs.-them thinking, and strident call for sweeping
reform. In this section, I survey several examples of
academic apocalyptic: teaching fads that vie for
attention as solutions to our current malaise. While I
find all of them wanting, I try to follow Robert
Birnbaum’s advice to discern in each some kernel of
applicability. Birnbaum chronicles the higher
education fads of the last forty years, analyzes their
appeal to administrators, and assesses their high cost
in cash, morale and wasted human effort (See MiniReview, next page). But he also adduces a counter-
A policy initiative or teaching approach is likely to be a fad in direct
proportion to the number of statements made in its defense of the
following form:
7
X is not a fad.
X is superior to a previous innovation, which was a fad.
X will lead to radical transformation of the institution.
X requires institution-wide implementation.
X will require a major change in institutional culture.
X is based on solid theory, objective data, and analysis.
X is opposed only by the ignorant or self-interested ideologues.
Adapted from Birnbaum 2001: 230-231.
intuitive finding: many of these fads, though destructive in
themselves, have brought long-term positive consequences.
Mini-Review
Robert Birnbaum
Management Fads in Higher Education: Where they
Come from, What They Do, Why They Fail. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
This book should be required reading for
administrators, for whom it might act as a salutary
prophylaxis against ever new academic and
managerial fads. More realistically, Birnbaum’s
analyses can be deployed by teachers to
contextualize and resist new fads as these are pushed
through by college administration: as Birnbaum
notes, “knowing what has gone before and why it did
not work may help readers resist unwise change”
(xviii-xix).
Birnbaum outlines the attraction of fads for
administrators despite persistent evidence that they
don’t work: implementing a new fad allows
management to “take charge,” to be seen to be doing
something. Management Fads chronicles the high
price—in institutional morale and effectiveness, but
also in cash—of four decades of ever-new attempts
to transform higher education, from PPBS and ZBB to
TQM and BPR: in each case one can trace a pattern of
“early enthusiasm, widespread dissemination,
subsequent disappointment, and eventual decline”
(Birnbaum 2001: 5, quoting R. E. Slavin). Because the
administrative turnover rate tends to outpace the fad
cycle, administration tends not to learn from this
pattern: those who implement a new fad rarely stick
around to clean up its mess (104, 125-142).
Birnbaum is highly critical of fads and emphasizes
their negative effects. However, Management Fads
also adduces an important finding: many of these
fads have left legacies of positive change: shaking up
universities and prodding them toward needed
transformation. “A fad should never be adopted,”
Birnbaum concludes, “but neither should it be
rejected out of hand.” Instead, a “skeptical curiosity”
can allow universities to manage fads as agents of
positive change, prudently selecting their good
components while avoiding their drawbacks (206-211
230-231).
Note: For an ethnographically rich account of a midsized, mid-level, Midwestern university in the grips of
fad-driven transformation, see Wannabe U (Tuchman
2009).
An example from the recent past might illustrate the issue.
Everyone can agree that higher education should strive for
“quality” and that teaching should be “excellent.” But what do
these words mean? The “Continuous Quality Improvement”
fad in higher education, which peaked in the early 1990s,
defined quality as whatever the customer (the student or
his/her parents) says it is: providing quality means ensuring
customer satisfaction. The model assumes that all customers
want the same thing, so the effort to improve quality becomes
an effort to “reduce variation in output.” The production of
educated (or at least of graduated) students is as amenable to
rationalized standardization as the manufacture of cars or
hotdogs. And yet in university one pays, among other things,
for the tools to evaluate what goals are worth pursuing—as
with architecture, psychotherapy, or the services of a
sommelier, in higher education one seeks for expert opinion
about ends as well as means. Ironically, CQM reduced quality
by measuring it in terms of what customers want before they
have acquired the tools to determine what they need. By the
mid-1990s, administrators and faculty had come to see these
problems, but not before enormous costs in time and energy
had already been expended (Birnbaum 2001: 92-108). And
today, some are proposing a voucher system suspiciously
similar to Continuous Quality Management to cure the ills of
higher education (Garland, 2009; discussed in Deresiewicz
2011). And yet CQM did have some use: it reminded teachers
that they do, in some sense, attempt to provide a product. That
is, teaching is a means, not an end, while learning is an end
itself. The quality or excellence of teaching is not intrinsic but
must be judged in terms of learning outcomes, in what it does
to or for students.
3.1: The Learning Paradigm
Such an emphasis on learning outcomes stands at the heart of
an influential trend that has lasted long enough to count now,
perhaps, as the status quo. The Learning Paradigm, proclaimed
in a seminal mid-nineties article, is the grandfather of many of
the fads surveyed below. It also illustrates the danger of
academic apocalyptic. Robert Barr and John Tagg strongly
contrast their Learning Paradigm to a straw-man of the
Instructional Paradigm it is intended to replace. College is not
8
“for” the provision of instruction but for the production of learning; students, not faculty, are the raison
d’être of university. Whatever works to increase learning should be embraced:
In a Learning Paradigm college, the structure of courses and lectures becomes dispensable and
negotiable. Semesters and quarters, lectures, labs, syllabi—indeed, classes themselves—become
options rather than received structures or mandatory activities. The Learning Paradigm
prescribes no one "answer" to the question of how to organize learning environments and
experiences. It supports any learning method and structure that works, where "works" is
defined in terms of learning outcomes, not as the degree of conformity to an ideal classroom
archetype (Barr & Tagg 1995)
As is so often the case, however, this ecstatic vision of creative chaos leads rather quickly in the
direction of rationalized, centralized authority: the path from Utopia to Panopticon can be short indeed.
As Barr and Tagg argue, “the Learning Paradigm necessarily incorporates the perspectives of the
assessment movement” and involves university-wide tracking of “learning outcomes”: not only the
achievement of substantive knowledge and core competencies, but also completion rates, graduation
rates, measures of student engagement and satisfaction—indeed all the measures which increasingly
agglomerate around all aspect of teaching and learning today (Barr & Tagg 1995). In practice, the
freewheeling non-conformist search for “whatever works” can facilitate a move from traditional faculty
oversight to “research-based best practices”—and these best practices are quantified and adjudicated by
central management. Teachers are right to distrust a paradigm that allocates rewards based on
centralized or extra-institutional criteria of learning success. And yet there can be little doubt that a
focus on learning presents a step in the right direction away from the position, still occasionally found,
that teaching consists simply in the imparting of information to a passive audience of students.
3.2. The Assessment Movement
The assessment movement championed by Barr and Tagg points toward a central irony of the Learning
Paradigm—its submission to the “tyranny of numbers” typical of higher-education fads more generally.
As Birnbaum argues, “measurement mania can be particularly disruptive to educational organizations”
since “superficial aspects of institutional output are often more easily measured than more substantive
ones” (2001: 197).It is unclear, for example, what assessment tool could best quantify the learning
outcomes of informal class discussion—which might nevertheless be a good pedagogic approach on
intrinsic grounds (Brookfield & Preskill 2005: 276-277). One must guard against putting the cart before
the horse, conforming an educational policy or a teaching approach to its assessability.
For example, we can easily measure the effects of student social experience on retention rates, and we
can discover that the better that social experience, the more likely students are to persist through
college (this is one of the findings of the National Survey of Student Engagement). Such a finding
should be the basis for college policy only insofar as retention is a good in itself—something that
remains to be demonstrated. True, we can’t teach students who aren’t enrolled (nor can the college
collect their tuition dollars). On the other hand, if institutional policy favors retention strategies that
interfere with academic rigor, coaxing students to hang around for four years loses its educational point.
As Arum and Roksa drily note, “the simple act of staying enrolled does not ensure that students are
learning much” (2011: 136). Similarly, graduation rates can be measured and policies shaped toward
increasing these rates, but such policies might do little to improve education. Indeed, graduation rates
9
Mini-Review
Scott E. Carrell and James E. West
“Does Professor Quality Matter?” Journal of Political
Economy 118.3 (2010) pp. 409-432.
Carrell and West studied a large cohort of students at the US
Air Force Academy. These students are randomly assigned to
professors for mandatory core courses (eliminating the
potential bias of “good” students selecting “good” teachers);
all sections of a given course use the same syllabus and exam
(eliminating most of the effects of grade inflation); finally,
students are randomly assigned to intermediate courses for
which the introductory courses serve as prerequisites
(making possible a longitudinal evaluation). Using these data,
Carrell and West make some unexpected discoveries:

Less experienced and less prestigious teachers
(contingent instructors and assistant professors)
receive higher SET scores than do more experienced
(tenured) teachers.

Unsurprisingly, SET scores correlate with students’
expected grades. However, the high SET also correlates
with high performance on the standardized tests taken
by all students in all sections: in other words, the less
experienced, more popular teachers really do seem to
be teaching better.

But—and this is a very big but indeed—students of
more experienced teachers do better in subsequent
classes in the same subject. In other words, “professors
who excel at promoting contemporaneous student
achievement teach in ways that improve their student
evaluations but harm the follow-up achievement of
their students in more advanced classes” (409,
emphasis added).
Carrell and West hypothesize that both the higher SET and
the higher grade in the introductory class may derive from
less experienced teachers sticking closely to the curriculum
and teaching to the test. In contrast, the more experienced
(but less popular and less successful in the short term)
teachers “broaden the curriculum and produce students with
a deeper understanding of the material, [… resulting in]
better achievement in the follow-up courses” (430). These
findings have important implications not only for the use of
SET data, but also for any assessment approach that uses
improved performance on final exams as an indicator of
increased learning and better teaching. Carrell and West
might thus have something to say, for example, to the
advocates of Academic Transformation (see section 3.5).
have been shown to depend largely on the characteristics
of incoming freshman; in other words, this metric has
less to do with anything that happens in the classroom
than with decisions made by the Admissions Office
before students arrive on campus (Astin 2004).
The most obviously problematic assessment of teaching
and learning is also the most widespread: Student
Evaluation of Teaching (SET). SET scores have been
shown to correlate with irrelevant factors, such as the
physical attractiveness of the teacher (Hamermesh &
Parker 2003; Lang 2003). High SET correlates closely
with high course GPA. This might indicate that students
are learning more (and thus getting better grades) from
good teachers—or it might just mean that easy
instructors are rewarded with high scores, encouraging
grade inflation (Felton, Koper, Mitchell, & Stinson 2006;
V. E. Johnson 2003: 14). Students can also give low SET
to punish teachers who have exposed them to
unconventional, controversial, or heterodox
viewpoints—as, surely, we should be doing (Fish 2005;
Theall & Franklin 2001). Concerns over SET have an
especially deadening effect on the teaching of temporary,
contingent, or adjunct faculty, whose re-appointment
often turns almost entirely on favorable SET (and who,
let us recall, teach a majority of introductory classes
nationally). While tenure-track faculty sometimes enact
a “disengagement compact” with students to maximize
time spent on research, adjunct faculty often adopt a “‘no
mess, no fuss’ teaching approach, avoiding rigorous
grading or heavy student workloads out of fear for their
jobs” (Gregorian 2005: 86, quoting adjunct-faculty union
activist P.D. Lesko). Despite all this, SET data often
affects decisions on hiring and promotion:
RateMyProfessors.com scores were even used to
determine the Princeton Review’s 2012 list of “the Best
300 Professors” in America (Berrett 2012b).
Needless to say, there are better and worse, more or less
valid modes of assessing learning outcomes.
Quantification, in itself, is no bad thing: Arum and
Roksa’s warning that we are failing our students is based
entirely on the analysis of the statistics derived from the
CLA, NSSE, and other assessment tools. Similarly, many
of the critiques and most of the recommendations made
in this and the next section rely on quantitative
10
assessment data. Yet the trend seems to be that if numbers can be generated, these will be used to justify
decisions sometimes best left to qualitative judgment or just to common sense. Recent British
experience should give us pause. Over the last two decades, the British higher education system has
suffered from a relentlessly quantitative “invasive interest in the quality of teaching.” Detailed data on
learning outcomes are centrally accumulated and assessed. Centrally determined and enforced
requirements abrogate faculty discretion in the classroom, demanding for example that teachers make
“appropriate use of technologies available through the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and
Learning.” Not surprisingly, some British teachers think this centralized system is destroying the
British educational system (Tuchman 2009: 184-187, see also 142-152). American colleges have not yet
reached this level of assessment, despite the best efforts of the Spellings Commission. I return to this
issue in Section 5.
3.3. Accommodating Digital Natives
In Section 1, I suggested that there are surprisingly few good data about the nature and habits of the
“millennial generation,” despite strident claims to the contrary (Hoover 2009). Millennials, we are told,
are plugged-in multitaskers, “accustomed to dealing with multiple information streams in short bursts”
(Louis Menand, quoted after Delbanco 2012b: 21). To stay relevant, universities must exploit the
potential of new digital media in education (Ito et al. 2008). The digital native cannot be expected to sit
through an hour of lecture or to read a full-length book. A decade ago, a colleague of mine extolled
PowerPoint as the only way to teach, since “the kids love it.” Today, of course, PowerPoint is oldschool: to stay relevant it must be updated with more movement, music and video, creating “‘Thriller’
PowerPoint presentations […] to grab and maintain students’ attention and foster deep learning” (Berk
2012).
Kids these days indubitably do harbor different expectations, exhibit different behaviors, express
themselves otherwise than do even the youngest of their professors. Jim Therrell notes that whereas
earlier generations tended to play actively together in self-started, self-structured, collaborative games
which they made up and revised as they went along, today’s college student grew up consuming prepackaged, pre-structured recreational activities such as videogames or organized sport (Therrell 2011).
Therrell is not wrong, but he leaves two issues unexamined. First—to what degree is this
generalization true across all students? Certainly my own children (for example) have engaged in
considerable self-started free-form play; in the other direction, Eszter Hargittai has shown that digital
fluency is far from uniform, and is distributed in the population of young adults according to the
education-level and wealth of their parents (Hargittai 2010).
Secondly: supposing that millennial students do have some of the characteristics attributed to them,
should we adapt our teaching to those characteristics or should students adapt to the habits of higher
education? If students are used to highly structured, prepackaged environments, should we provide
these—or should we push students out of their comfort zones? Linguistics professor Naomi S. Baron
puts the issue bluntly: "It is very common to hear people say, Here's the Millennial or the digital
generation, and we have to figure out how they learn. Poppycock. We get to mold how they learn"
(quoted in Carlson 2005).
Others make a similar point more circumspectly. Brian Cowan, a self-described technophile, asks
whether we should use Twitter in the classroom because “the kids are using it.” He argues that we
11
Mini-Review
Clickers
Clickers or “classroom response systems”—these are the small
remote-control-like devices increasingly ubiquitous in large
lecture classes—provide a good example of a trendy tool that can
be useful but comes with sometimes unexamined costs. Clickers
allow students to quickly and anonymously respond to multiple
choice questions posed by the teacher: results then appear onscreen, usually as bar-graphs.
Clickers have all sorts of good uses. They allow teachers to get
immediate real-time feedback on what students think about
what they are learning; they can be used to quickly get opinions
on-screen which can then become a basis for discussion; they can
facilitate “background knowledge probes” to assess what
students already know (or think they know) about a topic before
it is covered in class; they can be used for exam review. (These
examples come from the blog of click-evangelist Derek Bruff
(http://derekbruff.org/; see also Bruff 2009).
Disadvantages are less immediately obvious. Installing the
proprietary technology to use clickers can be expensive for
institutions. They are also expensive for students—as much as
$40 each—and since some clickers are bundled with textbooks, a
single student might have to pay for two or three different
clickers to be lugged around between classes. (The increasingly
popular alternative—using smart-phone apps in place of
clickers—rests on unexamined and unjustifiable assumptions
about student finances and personal-technology choices.) The
expense of clickers can deaden spontaneity as well: if you’ve
required your students to buy clickers, you had better put them
to frequent use. This ties the teacher to a particular technology
and pedagogy: since the clickers only work with presentation
software, the screen needs to be on all the time. More
insidiously, clickers work best with multiple-choice questions,
reinforcing an assumption many liberal arts teachers would
prefer to undermine, that most questions have a determinate,
known, single correct answer (God is: a. transcendent, b.
immanent, c. non-existent, d. seriously angry…).
Luckily one can get most of the benefits of clickers without the
cost and associated tech-driven rigidity. For example: cheap,
reusable color-coded flashcards (or even fingers of raised hands)
can be used to answer multiple choice questions that need not
be pre-programed—you can write these as they occur to you, on
the board, in chalk (Whitney 2011).
should not. Making class notes easily accessible by
iPhone will not render those materials more
attractive: that same iPhone will always include many
apps more immediately attractive than even the most
technically advanced teaching materials. Cowan
urges that we keep in mind the monastic origins of
higher education: classes should provide a
“cloistering [of] student and teacher away from the
distractions of everyday life” (Cowan 2011; cf.
Bauerlein 2012). Perhaps the biggest favor a teacher
can do for his or her millennial students is to give
them permission to sit in quiet contemplation of an
idea, away from the digital distractions of the rest of
their lives (for further discussion, see section 4.2
below).
Of course we should use digital media in our teaching
and assignments, wherever appropriate. José Antonio
Bowen, a bestselling advocate of “teaching naked”
without technology in the classroom, is also a pioneer
of podcasting and the creation of “virtual classrooms”
(Bowen 2012; cf. Young 2009). Blogging, discussion
boards, GoogleDoc collaborations can be wonderful
teaching tools. YouTube has, by now, a wellestablished and I think largely salutary place in the
classroom. Moreover, as Ron Tanner reminds us,
many of our students aren’t really digital natives at
all, and could use some instruction on how to
navigate the digital landscape (Tanner 2011). But the
“Digital Native” trend goes too far, mistaking a useful
tool for an end in itself.
3.4. Flipping the Lecture
In its weaker sense, “flipping” provides a trendy new
buzz-word for a series of active and collaborative
techniques of venerable pedigree—discussion groups,
problem-solving sessions, debates, concept-mapping
activities in the classroom (possibly abetted with
“clickers”—see Figure 3.2). In its stronger sense,
“flipping” gets rid of in-class lecture entirely,
replacing it with podcasts, TED talks; audio-visual
materials from firms such as Coursera or the
Harvard/MIT collaboration EdX; or with grassroots tutorials such as Salman Khan’s YouTubebased Khan Academy (Berrett 2012a; Bowen 2012;
12
Young 2010, 2012a; 2013). Students watch these on their own time outside of class, freeing up classtime for application, discussion, and “unpacking” of content imparted before class begins. Some
enthusiastic flippers report great learning outcomes: increased attendance, better test scores, “problem”
students suddenly flourishing in the flipped environment (Neshyba 2013).
Skeptics note that students tend to dislike flipped classes, with their demand for lots of outside
preparation and in-class participation. Advocates such as Harvard’s Eric Mazur note rightly that
student satisfaction “is not the goal of education”: flipping should be used because it works (Berrett
2012a). However, not all flipped classes are created equal, nor do all negative reactions come from
students who don’t want to think or work. On the contrary, “flipping” can become code for cost-saving
approaches with online lectures, online computer-graded exercises, and optional face-to-face class-time
with faculty. As Ben Rudolph, a Stanford student enrolled in a flipped computer-science course,
complained: “these new classes are getting rid of in-person lectures completely. I met barely anyone in
my CS229a class. Everything was done alone in my room, which is kind of crappy especially when there
is such a nice campus right outside” (quoted in Parry 2012a). As Rudolph’s experience shows, an
approach intended to increase student engagement, peer-teaching, and community learning can have the
opposite effect, sending students off to their dorm-rooms to be alone with their computers.
As “flipping” gains traction, one may expect the term to be applied to much of what many of us already
do. Indeed the cynical reader might note strong similarities between the new “flipped” classroom and
that oldest of old-school teaching formats: the seminar. Both rest on a central premise that the bulk of
learning occurs outside the classroom—whether through reading and research or through the watching
of podcasts—and that class-time is best spent on application, discussion, and clarification. To the degree
that it remains an option, a tool among others, flipping should be understood as a good teaching practice
to be used where appropriate. There is no problem—and much promise—with the flipping approach as
such. But the term can function as a pedagogical Trojan Horse for more central administrative (or offcampus) control of course-content. In a plausible worst-case scenario, curriculum is outsourced to
proprietary online providers, with in-class teaching relegated to optional student-led discussion forums.
Ironically and unintentionally, the intense participation “flipping” is designed to foster can itself flip into
its opposite: passively watching talking heads on a screen.
3.5: MOOCs and Similar
The “worst-case scenario” outlined above has already become a reality at some institutes of higher
education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) function as flipped classrooms on a gigantic scale,
with Harvard or MIT or Stanford professors providing podcast lectures backed up with automatically
graded online quizzes and exercises (Bousquet 2012; Kolowich 2013a). MOOCs became national news in
the spring of 2013 when the Philosophy Department at San José State University refused to incorporate
a Harvard MOOC into their curriculum. In an open letter to the MOOC’s creator, the San José
philosophers highlighted this problem of outsourcing, centralization, and uniformity: “The thought of
the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country
is downright scary—something out of a dystopian novel. … Diversity in schools of thought and
plurality of points of view are at the heart of liberal education” (Department of Philosophy 2013;
Kolowich 2013b). Moreover, a sufficient critique of the MOOC model might be furnished by its own
most ardent boosters: a Chronicle survey found that 66% of professors who had taught a MOOC
considered them to be “worth the hype.” However, just 28% agreed that “students who succeed in your
13
MOOC deserve formal credit from your home institution” (Kolowich 2013c). In other words, a Harvardproduced MOOC might be good enough for the proles at SJSU, but not for Harvard students.
Meanwhile, a variety of related organizations have combined many of the trends outlined above—
an avowedly learner-centered approach, ubiquitous multifaceted assessment, accommodation of the
perceived needs of the millennial generation, a “flipped” classroom—to radically reconfigure both the
university experience and the balance of power between administration and faculty within institutions.
Academic Transformation, the best-established of several similar models, can be treated as the
exemplar—the Open Learning Initiative is its main rival. Both have received a great deal of interest
from the media, government, and investors including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. The model at play here is most honestly expressed by Candace Thille, who
describes her Open Learning Initiative as the “the educational equivalent of Super Bowl ads”:
expensively designed but cheaply available (Parry 2012b). Consolidation and uniformity lie at the heart
of Academic Transformation. Multiple sections of a large introductory course, taught by multiple
faculty members, are reduced to a single, standardized, very large class. This single class is delivered
largely through online modules, webcasts, and computer-graded tutorials and
● ● ●
quizzes. Classes, meanwhile, become rarer but smaller—seminar-style discussion
sections, or collaborative groups visited by the professor on a rotating basis
Only 28% of professors who
(Nemko 2008; Twigg & Stoll 2005). Academic Transformation claims impressive
have taught a MOOC think
results: improved student learning, higher retention rates—and cost savings to
students who pass a MOOC
the university of as much as 77% (Twigg 2012).
course deserve formal credit
from the professor’s home
institution
Cheerleaders for Academic Transformation hail it as a “major success” that
improves student learning at lower cost, and accuse institutions which have not
yet adopted it of acting in bad faith (Carey 2010 (and see Figure 3.1 above)). And
yet there are worries, not all of them motivated by job security. Both Twigg and
● ● ●
Thille consistently contrast their approach to large, disengaged, “sage on the
stage” style lectures—and who likes those? But an actual consequence of these
initiatives is the consolidation of “lecture” into very large classes, supplemented by seminar-like work
accomplished on-line, through automated quizzes, or with undergraduate peer facilitators. In other
words, the real target for Academic Transformation, as Twigg makes inadvertently clear (Twigg &
Stoll 2005) would likely be classes of 30-50 students—the sort in which a good teacher can accomplish a
great deal of active collaborative learning, albeit at relatively high labor costs. Moreover, the model
relies on software to guide students through problem-sets with instant feedback, an approach that might
increase completion but discourages free-form exploration or reflection. As one critic puts it, software is
“very good at prompting students to go step by step, and ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and all these bells and
whistles with hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they’re not prompted step by step” (Parry
2012b). As the findings of Carrell and West suggest, such step-by-step teaching might increase shortterm learning but leave students poorly prepared for more advanced courses (see Mini-Review 3.2). We
now turn to teaching approaches that do facilitate such deep, long-term learning.
4. What Can Teachers Do?
There is too much teaching advice available. A teacher who set out to master even that small fraction of
such advice as is actually tested or useful would never have any time to teach (or to do research, or eat,
or sleep). This advice, broadly speaking, comes in two genres. The “Stand and Deliver” genre inspires
but also intimidates with its accounts of the often inimitable achievements of extraordinary teachers. In
14
contrast, the “Nitty-Gritty” genre gives very specific,
very detailed, hands-on practical advice—it may not
inspire, but it instructs. (For examples of each genre, see
Mini-Review at right). This section seeks to fly a middle
route between the clouds and the ground, surveying
select teaching approaches and methods—and some study
approaches we can encourage in our students—that are
generally applicable and do not require large inputs of
time, money, or structural institutional change.
Mini-Review
Ken Bain
What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press; 2004
and
4.1. Learn from the Psychology of Education
This is a necessary but frustrating task. Rather a lot of
this scholarship takes for granted the data-driven,
assessment-based approaches critiqued elsewhere in this
report, while paying scant attention to issues of critical
pedagogy or the question “what is college for,” addressed
in Section 2 above. In addition, the psychology of
pedagogy, like any field, has its own fads and factions
among which outsiders can easily get lost, picking up
approaches that have not yet been tested or are already
debunked. For example, many teachers today still use the
VARK model of learning styles: visual, aural, read/write,
and kinesthetic (Fleming & Mills 1992). However, more
recent research finds little evidence to support the notion
of learning styles or its benefit to course-design (Coffield,
Moseley, Hall, & Ecclestone 2004; Pashler, McDaniel,
Rohrer, & Bjork 2008). Nevertheless and with some
trepidation, I present here a few findings from the recent
research.
Spacing and Interleaving
The spacing effect suggests that material is retained better
if studied repeatedly; however this repetition must be
spread out or spaced. In other words, one should study a
given concept or skill long enough to learn it well, but
immediate additional studying is inefficient. Instead, one
should return to the material after some days or weeks
have passed. Concepts learnt in just one session and never
repeated are unlikely to be retained, while concepts
returned to several times throughout the semester are
likely to sink in (Lang 2011; Rohrer & Pashler 2007).
Spacing can be incorporated easily into course design; one
can also advise students to space their own study for
maximal retention.
15
Barbara Gross Davis
nd
Tools for Teaching, 2 ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2009
Ken Bain’s jaunt through the classrooms of “the best
college teachers” exhilarates and exasperates in
about equal measure. Bain observes star teachers
and attempts to distil their essence, which, as
presented here, includes both bland platitudes (good
teachers have a masterful understanding of the
subjects they teach) and provocative findings (good
teachers allow more-or-less unlimited revision of
written work before grading). Bain’s best teachers are
demanding but flexible, highly prepared but
spontaneous. The book is inspiring but somewhat
short on socioeconomic context—most of the “best”
benefit from the low course-loads, small classes, and
highly motivated students of the elite colleges in
which they teach. (For a sample of Bain’s findings, see
also his brief “What Makes Great Teachers Great?”
(2004).)
If What the Best Teachers Do is like a tour through the
kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants, Tools for
Teaching is more like The Joy of Cooking: exhaustive,
detail-oriented, user-friendly, and long. Some of its
suggestions are thoroughly pedestrian, and some a
bit old-fashioned, but all are kitchen-tested. No
normal cook would attempt to make every dish listed
in Joy, nor should a teacher use every technique listed
in Tools. Its 592 pages, meticulously organized into 61
chapters, cover everything from grading and rubrics
to games and role-play, from lecturing to learning in
groups. As a reference manual for practical tips and
techniques, Davis’ tome is without peer.
Note: Blogs and newsletters provide the best way to
keep abreast of teaching tips and approaches,
without drowning in the flood of materials available.
Among the best of these: The Teaching Professor,
edited by Maryellen Weimer, provides a steady diet
of practical user-tested teaching techniques.
Interleaving is related to spacing. It involves teaching or studying a variety of different skills or concepts
in “interleaved” bits rather than in big chunks. A musician doesn’t practice scales for a week and then
arpeggios for a week and then chord-progressions, but is likely to interleave all three into each practice
session: classes should be similarly structured. In itself, such interleaving creates a spacing effect. But it
also increases learning because students get used to figuring out and applying the right concept to the
right task or issue: they learn to “pair each problem with the appropriate procedure” and thus avoid
formulaic application of skills (Rohrer & Taylor 2010). Although interleaving has been most applied
(and is perhaps most appropriate) to mathematics and science, it could be used in the humanities as
well—interleaving different sorts of writing or poem analysis, for example, rather than teaching each
kind in blocks.
Effortful Retrieval and the Testing Effect
Tried and true methods such as re-reading, making outlines, writing out your notes are all good.
However, according to recent studies by Mark A. McDaniel, Jeffrey D. Karpicke and others (as reported
in Glenn 2009) standard study habits such as re-reading or writing out one’s notes can create a false
sense of confidence. Such habits never require a student to transfer information to active memory: the
book, or the notes, or the study-guide are always there to be consulted. Instead one should put one’s
books and notes away and attempt, in writing or speech, to recall as much as one can. Such effortful
retrieval in self-testing provides a more accurate measure of one’s mastery of the material, and requires
the same sort of active reconstruction of knowledge as would be required in a well-designed test or a
real-life application. To encourage effortful retrieval, we can ask students to use the “Teach it to a Fifth
Grader” technique—explaining class concepts to a dorm-mate or friend who isn’t in the class (Lemuel
2011). If they can’t get a roommate to understand the material, they may not understand it so very well
themselves.
We can encourage our students to use effortful retrieval in their own study. We
can also design it into our courses through frequent low-stakes classroom
quizzes, which, according to advocates of the testing effect, dramatically improve
Re-reading or writing out
recall of course material (Glenn 2007; Roediger & Karpicke 2006). There is a
one’s notes can create a false
potential tension here: given faculty and student time-constraints, such quizzes
sense of confidence.
can tend toward multiple-choice assessment, encouraging the atomistic notion of
knowledge criticized in Section 4.2 below. However, according to the
● ● ●
experiments reported on by Glenn (2007), frequent or immediate short-answer
quizzing improves recall far more than does multiple choice. Glenn also reports
tentative findings that frequent quizzing encourages the absorption of “a broad range of material not
directly included in the quizzes” as students, in attempting to answer the quiz question, recall related
concepts from the lecture or reading. Ideally one would want to balance such frequent quizzes against
longer-term open-ended work, such as the classic essay with its complex marshalling of fact and
argument.
●
●
●
Disfluency
Among the more counterintuitive findings of the psychology of learning, the notion of disfluency
suggests that people retain information better when they find it initially difficult to acquire (Lang 2012).
The brain processes easily acquired information as less important or less worthy of attention than
information gained with effort. For example, students remembered an article written in a difficult grayscale font better than a control group reading the same article in easy-to-read Arial. Similarly, students
who had to supply missing information to make sense of a text remembered its information better than
16
did students for whom all information was supplied. Compare “She was
deeply angry with him. The next day his body was covered in bruises” to
“She was deeply angry with him. She punched him repeatedly. The next
day his body was covered in bruises.” In the first set of sentences,
students must supply the causal inference and therefore think more
deeply about the information—leading to higher retention.
Should we force our students to read the smudged and faded 5thgeneration mimeographs that many of us remember from our own
undergraduate days? Maybe not. But disfluency can be achieved through
many of the practices many of us already use—some of which practices
are decidedly old-school. Primary texts and scholarly articles, for
example, tend to be disfluent in comparison to the pre-digested, prepackaged, schematized materials found in textbooks. Students may
legitimately complain about the difficulty of such undigested readings
(and they might elect not to read them at all—a serious concern). But the
knowledge laboriously extracted with effort from a difficult article might
stay with students longer than the same knowledge presented in
simplified point form in a textbook or study-guide (Lang 2012).
One can promote disfluency in fun ways as well. Make students
translate material into unfamiliar forms—Descartes explained in
limericks, a data-set transposed into dialogue form. The popular
technique, standard in many classes, of asking students to defend
positions they oppose or to attack positions they hold dear is also (in
addition to its other virtues), an exercise in disfluency.
4.2. Change Student Metacognition
Students have opinions, usually tacit, often mistaken, about their own
ability to learn. Presenting students with the research on learning can
motivate them to change their ideas about themselves and their own
behaviors, and thus to learn better. Below, I present some of the common
student misconceptions about learning, together with suggestions about
how to change these misconceptions and move toward better study
habits. The section is based on Stephen Chew’s excellent “Improving
Classroom Performance by Challenging Student Misconceptions about
Learning” (Chew 2010), but I have not hesitated to expand on Chew’s
suggestions.
Misconception 1: Talent is Innate
This is largely untrue. Moreover, merely believing that it is true can
interfere with learning. Those who think talent is inborn avoid failure by
avoiding hard work: they give up easily, get discouraged, blame
externalities. Students who believe that learning is primarily a matter of
effort, that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” tend to make
17
Mini-Review
Carol Dweck
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.
Mindset presents strong evidence relating
self-image to learning. Briefly: those who
see intelligence as an innate, unchanging
disposition (a “fixed mindset” in Dweck’s
terms) tend to avoid activities which
might put their self-image at risk. They
are not motivated to work hard (since
hard work makes little difference); and
their self-image is fragile—a fixedmindset student who has been told
throughout high-school that he or she is
smart can have that belief shattered by a
single poor test result. In contrast, people
with a “growth mindset” believe that
intelligence and talent can increase
through hard work; accordingly they
welcome challenge and treat negative
outcomes as learning opportunities.
Dweck argues that mindset itself is not
innate—fixed-mindset students can learn
to develop the growth mindset and to
enjoy its benefits. Teachers can
encourage a growth mindset by praising
effort (“You really put a lot of time and
care into that essay, and it shows”) rather
than disposition (“You’re a great writer”).
By emphasizing time-on-task and
perseverance over intelligence, we can
help our students acquire these qualities
and move toward the resilience and
confidence characteristic of the growth
mindset. Some readers (including myself)
may find Dweck’s contrast between the
fixed and growth mindsets overdrawn
and oversimplified, while still gaining
good teaching tips from this engaging
book.
Note: Reviews, interviews and related
articles can be found at Dweck’s website:
mindsetonline.com.
Adaptable Assignment:
Relationships
In my introductory World Religions course I use “key terms”—core
concepts, categories, or examples. To counteract some students’
tendency to memorize these terms atomistically, I ask students to
argue and give evidence for relationships between two or more key
terms; these are posted on the Blackboard Discussion Board for their
own and other students’ use. Relations can be of several kinds:
comparison: “monotheism is like monism insofar as...”
contrast: “monotheism differs from monism because...”
encompassment: “Daoism is a kind of monism in that...”
that effort and are less discouraged when they
encounter obstacles (Duckworth & Seligman 2005).
This doesn’t mean one must deny inborn
predispositions toward poetry or geometry or
history: of course some people are better at some
things than at others. But a student who reframes
“I’m bad at math” as “I have to work especially hard
at math,” is more likely to actually do the necessary
hard work, rather than fulfill the prophecy of their
self-definition. Perhaps more surprisingly, students
who are praised as intelligent after succeeding on a
test or paper seek to preserve this self-image by
avoiding failure, taking on study habits that interfere
with deep learning (see Mini-Review, previous page).
implication: “monism implies an immanent theory of sacred power
because...”
Misconception 2: Knowledge is Atomistic
One need not involve oneself in an inquiry into
epistemology to show that an atomistic theory of
correlation: “cosmogonies featuring a divine craftsperson tend to
correlate with monotheism; for example...”
knowledge—whatever its potential merits—results
in poor learning and retention. Flashcard factoids
Initial results have been encouraging. Indeed, the mere instruction to
and the bold-print definitions commonly found in
attempt to find relationships seem, by itself, to get some students to
textbooks encourage atomistic thinking. In contrast,
think less atomistically and has led to more complex, more in-depth
“deep processing” of information is both the sort of
answers to exam questions.
thinking we want our students to practice, and is a
more effective strategy for memorization than are
“shallow processing” strategies of rote learning
(Chew 2010). One can encourage students to focus
on interrelations between concepts, asking them to look for relationships, contrasts, and implications of
the concepts learned. Even note-taking and highlighting can become “deep-process” study habits if,
instead of copying out “facts,” they are oriented toward habits of summary (what is most important here,
and why?) and relationship (how does this relate to that?). Key-terms, though potentially atomistic, can
be placed into relationship through concept maps, in which terms form “nodes” which connect to other
terms in relations of similarity, contrast, subordination, and so on. Such relations can also be expressed
through positioning of terms, as in an essay outline, or through different colors or thicknesses of line.
(Berry & Chew 2008; Davis 2009: 209; Fox & Morrison 2005).
Misconception 3: I’m Good at Multitasking
No you probably are not. Despite some students’ millennialist conviction that they can study or write
while checking Facebook, texting, and watching TV, they can’t. According to a well-publicized Stanford
study (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner 2009; summarized in Gorlick 2009), self-declared multitaskers are mostly
just distracted. In fact, when given tasks that required the “tuning out” of extraneous information,
“multitaskers” did considerably worse than those who consider themselves poor at multitasking: they
couldn’t ignore things, retained information less well, and had difficulty switching between tasks.
Recent studies demonstrate an inverse relation between multi-tasking on laptops during class and
academic performance (Kraushaar & Novak 2010); and between text-messaging, in class our out, and
GPA (Harman & Sato 2011). The moral is pretty clear: we should discourage multitasking in our
18
classrooms (no texting in class) and, insofar as
possible, we should discourage it outside the
classroom as well (see Adaptable Assignment 4.2).
Adaptable Assignment:
Unplugging
Allegra Blake has developed an “unplugging” assignment for her
intermediate composition (ENG201) courses at Central Michigan
University.
4.3. Encourage Group Work
Against the prevailing trends of the learningFirst, students log their time watching TV, playing computer games,
centered classroom, the authors of Academically Adrift
surfing the Internet, reading and sending emails, and using social
are equivocal at best about active and collaborative
media over a 96-hour (4-day) period: they also count the number of
learning. They denounce group learning outright:
text messages sent and received. Second, students are asked to
whereas they find a very strong direct correlation
refrain from the above activities for another 4-day period (email and
between hours spent studying alone and improved
the internet can be used for job or school-related purposes only).
CLA scores, time spent studying in groups correlates
Students log their time-use, noting any increase in other activities
(sports, relationships, schoolwork); they also log any change in their
inversely to CLA improvement. In fact, studying in
mental and emotional state (anxiety, contentment, attention) using a
groups is almost as damaging to the growth of
Likert-scale questionnaire.
critical-thinking competence as is time spent in
The assignment is designed to make students aware of their hyperfraternity / sorority life (Arum & Roksa 2011: 101).
availability through social media, and to consider whether time spent
Against this rather damning evaluation one might
using such media could be used otherwise. Allegra reports positive
venture three points. First: Arum and Roksa seem to
results, including but not limited to long term increases in academic
conflate “studying in groups” (an activity often
performance from students who complete the assignment.
indistinguishable from “hanging out”) with organized
in-class collaborative group-work. Secondly: CLA
improvement (and the critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing skills such improvement
ostensibly measures) are not the only important outcome of college. Group work might help inculcate
other valuable skills (teamwork, leadership, collegiality) or might foster other substantive goods
(exposure to diverse political, religious, ethical, socioeconomic, racial, sexual-orientation backgrounds).
Once again, how one teaches depends on how one answers the question, “what is college for?”
Third: Group-work may be so often ineffective because it is so often poorly organized (Colbeck,
Campbell, & Bjorklund 2000). Better-organized group work will, unsurprisingly, result in better
outcomes. David Johnson and Roger Johnson, both of whom train teachers for group-work at the
Cooperative Learning Center in the University of Minnesota, distinguish two sorts of learning group.
In “traditional classroom learning groups” individuals have little incentive to help each other, teach each
other, or learn from one another, while “cooperative learning groups” are more than the sum of their
parts (Johnson & Johnson 1999; see also Millis 2007; Millis 2010). Such groups don’t happen by
accident. They require the fostering of a “positive interdependence” by which students understand that
they succeed or fail as a group, that they need each other. Effective groups also require “individual
accountability” to avoid free-riding and coasting. Depending on the assignment, this can be achieved in
a number of ways—for example by randomly grading one student’s work as representative of the whole
group. Finally, effective groups need “face-to-face promotive interaction” to achieve the specifically
group-centered outcomes of social support, teamwork, and camaraderie (Johnson & Johnson 1999).
Successful group work may depend on what Ken Bain calls a “natural critical learning environment”
(Bain 2004; cf. Palmer 1998 on the "subject-centered" classroom): groups must be called upon to think
critically about subjects they have been made to care about, subjects they have realized are important to
their lives.
19
Such well-designed cooperative group-learning might not improve CLA scores for the individuals who
take part, though Johnson and Johnson claim that it should: cooperative learning results in “more
higher level reasoning” and “more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions” than does work alone
(Johnson & Johnson 1999). Be that as it may, such group-work does increase substantive knowledge and
understanding of a course’s content and can improve those “soft skills” of communication and
interpersonal competence sought after by employers and necessary to a functioning democracy
(Brookfield & Preskill 2005).
4.4. Encourage Reading and Writing
Arum and Roksa’s approach to teaching can seem excessively mechanistic, succumbing to the very
form-over-content emphasis they elsewhere disparage. Thus forty pages of reading assigned per week is
equated to increased CLA scores, without regard for how the reading of those pages might be
encouraged or enforced, let alone what those pages might say: presumably forty pages of The Critique of
Pure Reason will have different learning outcomes than forty pages of Twilight. And there is a very big
difference between writing a 20-page research paper over the course of a semester and writing 20 onepage reflections in the same period. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the more reading and writing
students are encouraged to engage in, the better they will get at reading and writing—and also at
mastery of content knowledge. According to Barbara Gross Davis, as little as five minutes of writing per
week (or about an hour, total, over the course of a semester) improves test scores (Davis 2009: 309).
Adaptable Assignment:
Reading Questions
Merlyn Mowrey uses the reading questions below to focus her
students’ reading:
What is the text about? What is its subject? Initially, most students
look for the “what” while ignoring the other questions.
Why did the author write it? What were the author’s (explicit or
implicit) aims, purpose, and motivations? How do these affect
what has been written?
How did the author write it? What is the author’s methodology?
Rhetorical strategy (irony, sarcasm, exhortation, comparison,
etc.)? What counts as evidence?
Although these may seem like basic reading strategies, Merlyn reports
that many students are not accustomed to reading in this way.
Applying these questions results in dramatically improved
comprehension of and engagement with the difficult texts for which
Merlyn’s courses are justly famous.
For further tips and assignments designed to inculcate good reading
habits, see From Critical Thinking to Argument (Barnet & Bedau 2011).
Don’t assume your students are writing elsewhere.
Too often, writing is downloaded onto the English
Department composition course. Nationally, 95% of
composition courses are further downloaded onto
over-worked adjuncts or an ever-rotating roster of
graduate assistants. To be effective, the teaching of
writing must be labor-intensive and time-consuming,
demanding a great deal of both student and teacher.
Although many students (70% of seniors in one
recent study) recognize that writing is a uniquely
effective means by which to stimulate, clarify, and
extend thought, they also pick up subtle and not-sosubtle clues from teachers outside the composition
program that composition classes don’t matter—
they’re something to get through, to pass with the
minimal necessary effort (Bok 2006: 83-85, 92).
Meanwhile, Writing-Across-the-Curriculum
programs suffer from lack of funding, from student
tendencies to avoid such courses where possible, and
from teachers unable or unwilling to put in the time
and hard work, in class and out, to make such
writing a real contribution to learning. And yet it
seems clear that “undergraduates will never learn to
write with clarity, precision, and grace unless they
20
have repeated opportunities to keep on writing and
get prompt feedback from the faculty” (Bok 2006: 87).
Teaching writing in the subject areas is hard work,
but it may be the most important thing we do as
teachers: among other reasons, recall that the
Conference Board found competence in “written
communication” to be among the most important and
least well-developed skill of entry-level collegeeducated employees. From a less instrumentalist
perspective, reading and writing can be at the center
of what Parker Palmer calls the “subject centered”
classroom (see Mini-Review at p. 32, below). By
reading primary texts—poems, scripture, philosophy,
but also difficult, undigested works of scholarship—
the teacher and students place something larger than
themselves at the center of their study. The text
becomes something more than a source of prepackaged information for the test: instead it is
appreciated and explored as a human creation full of
surprises. Writing about such a text, and about the
classroom discussion about the text, allows students
to combine their individual voice with the group, the
silence of personal reflection with the dialogue
through which that reflection is developed,
challenged, and refined (Palmer 1998: 78-80).
4.5. Inculcate Academic Self-Efficacy
Adaptable Assignment:
Writing to Learn
“Writing to Learn” denotes a wide variety of low-stakes short writing
assignments that focus less on the writing process itself than on the
learning which such writing helps inculcate. Such assignments
complement but should not supplant more formal, polished writing
assignments such as research essays. Writing to learn can be assigned
for pre-class homework or can be done as an in-class exercise.
Dialogue: Students write a 2-page dialogue between holders of
divergent perspectives on an issue (a deontologist and a
consequentialist on lying; a Buddhist and a Jew on the nature of the
self; relativist and a quantum physicist on gravity). This exercise is
good for reading comprehension and as preparation for class
discussion.
Pre-Discussion Writing: Introduce a topic in class and have students
write for five minutes before discussion; this will clarify their own
position and give them more confidence. The writings can be the
focus of small-group discussion or can be passed to another student,
who must then defend the view there written whether or not it
corresponds with his or her own.
End of Class Free Writing: Set aside 5 minutes at the end of class for
students to synthesize and reflect on the issues raised in lecture. This
will help with comprehension and retention.
QuARC blogging: Ask students to post brief QuARCs (Questions,
Arguments, Reflections, and Comments) about the lecture to the
online discussion board—these are due within 24 hours of the end of
lecture, and the teacher can use them to see what needs to be
addressed or clarified in the next lecture. Remind students that these
are public (other students can read them), and encourage students to
respond to or argue about each other’s QuARCs.
This recommendation stands in tension with most of
what has gone before, and indeed with most recent
scholarship on teaching and learning. Both the trends
Some of the above come from my own practice; others from a TLC
critiqued in Section 3 and the teaching approaches
presentation by Melinda Kreth and Marcy Taylor. Still others can be
advocated in Section 4 have tended to emphasize
found in Encouraging Student Writing (Tollefson 2002; see also Bean
clearly stated expectations, repeatable and
2011; Barnet & Bedau 2011, and the resources at
www.bucks.edu/academics/facultystandardized assessment formulae: everything in the
web/bestpractices/writingtolearn/).
service of carefully conceptualized learning outcomes.
One finds considerably less emphasis on self-efficacy,
autonomy, student ownership of and responsibility
for their own learning—and when this is discussed its
potential tension with clear step-by-step procedure
can be neglected or ignored. Thus for example Barbara Millis suggests that cooperative group-work
assignments are best carried out in a context of “clearly defined goals, procedures, and expectations” and
that such exercises help students become “autonomous, motivated, responsible, empowered learners”
(Millis 2007). Millis is not alone in overlooking the disjunction here between accountability and
21
Adaptable Assignment:
The Open Creative Project
Assignment-design usually emphasizes specific goals, clearly stated
and explained. Students are told what to do, how to do it, and why it
will help them achieve their learning outcomes. Such assignments are
good and important: as with shooting hoops or playing scales, they
focus on a specific skill and build it up. But one shoots hoops in order
to play basketball; one plays scales so as to be able to jam.
By their very nature, closely structured assignments can’t inculcate
independence, creativity, self-efficacy, or risk-taking. We can lead our
student to water but we can’t make them plunge in, feel its cool
exhilaration on their skin for themselves, forge ahead to the other
side—and yes, possibly get swept away by the current—unless we let
go of the reins.
The Open Creative Project, which I borrow and adapt from Michel
Desjardins of Wilfrid Laurier University, is such an exercise in risktaking. It involves:

A sufficiently large course-grade for the risk to be meaningful (in
my courses, 25%)

An initial, low-grade proposal, to mitigate student anxiety and
provide the opportunity to give advice

A written appendix (about 3 pages), discussing the project and
its relation to course material

Otherwise, near-total freedom of form, length, and content
I always allow a traditional—but also quite open—research paper as
an alternative, but I resist the strong urge to structure the OPC—
which is intended to allow students the space to grow through
creative self-efficacy.
Results are mixed. Some projects are amateurish, slap-dash, and
disappointing—but then, so are so many research papers! Others go
far beyond what I thought a student capable of: sculptures, video
games, original songs composed and performed; one-act plays… Freed
from instructions, some students create works of beauty and
demonstrate far deeper understanding of course material than they
would have done in an essay.
autonomy, clear goals and open-ended exploration:
nor does she seem to recognize that selfempowerment might not be best served by a regime
of rubrics and checklists.
Such disjunction need not signal incompatibility. As
poets know, the constraints imposed upon their art
make possible its freedoms: “Nuns fret not at their
convent's narrow room,” nor do the rigorous
limitations of the sonnet or the haiku confine the
possibilities of language. But the tension should be
acknowledged more than I have found it to be, and
an emphasis on clear outcomes should be counterbalanced by open-ended assignments. Self-efficacy
can only be learned by taking charge; thoughtful
risk-taking can’t be fully developed without actually
taking risks. Both student and administrative
expectations push teachers toward handholding—a
nurturing but not always pedagogically challenging
approach. For example, Jason Bentley reports that
first-semester Central Michigan University students
love their newfound independence—the chance to
become “responsible, independent adults.” But these
same students are dissatisfied with the CMU
“Academic Experience,” which they find lacking in
“teacher support” (Bentley 2011). In other words,
many students want to be independent everywhere
except in academic experience, where they want their
hands held and their feet guided.
We should hold our students’ hands and guide their
feet—after all we are pedagogues (Greek for “guides
for children”) and educators (people charged, in
Latin, with “leading out” our students). But we
should also learn to let go. Academic self-efficacy can
be built into the curriculum, for example with
capstone independent research papers or senior
theses. But by the time students get to their senior
year, some of them are so used to guidance that
independent study comes as a painful shock.
Wherever possible and to a reasonable degree, such
independent, un-rubricized, open-ended assignments
should be introduced in the lower level courses—
even or especially in introductory courses.
22
5. What Can Institutions Do?
Perhaps the most hopeful finding of Academically Adrift is that institutional policies can make a large
difference in the degree to which students improve their critical thinking and writing skills during their
time in college. Variance across institutions accounts for 20% of the variance in CLA-score growth in the
first two years of college (Arum & Roksa 2011: 115)—and this is after such factors as elite vs. openenrollment, liberal-arts vs. research, small vs. large have been factored out. Some schools clearly do a
better job fostering good teaching than do others.
Individual teachers can only accomplish so much. As the previous section suggests, teachers can and
should adopt policies and methods which increase student learning. We can inspire students; we can
hold students to high standards; we can get them excited about our subject matter; we can make them
read and write. But without institutional support and a culture of learning, our efforts will inevitably
yield meager harvests. Credentialist students will steer away from our classes, or will punish our high
standards with high DEW rates and low SET scores. Central administrators intent on student retention
and engagement will see such statistics, ironically, as evidence of poor teaching.
Ultimately, good teaching and good learning demand a university-wide effort. Although there is no
formula for successful colleges, all the best ones have in common what Kuh
calls “an unshakable focus on student learning” (Kuh, et al. 2010: 65). The point
● ● ●
is worth emphasizing: without such commitment, nothing else will make much
Individual teachers can only
difference. Kuh notes that many colleges offer many of the features his research
team found predictive of student success: features such as first-year seminars
do so much. Without a
and senior capstone projects, student-support services, or peer tutoring. But
university-wide culture of
merely “offering” such features is meaningless—wasted effort at best, windowlearning, our efforts will
dressing at worst—unless they are of high-quality, made available to all or
inevitably yield meager
most students, and are integrated into a university-wide culture of learning
harvests.
(Kuh, et al. 2010: 264).
● ●
But one must start somewhere. This section considers institution-wide policies
to arrest academic drift and to foster genuine learning. However, mindful that
many university administrations declare a commitment to teaching excellence while pursuing policies
that undermine teaching and learning, I emphasize policies or practices that can realistically be aimed
for by departments and programs, by grass-roots organizations of faculty and students, and by
organized faculty associations and unions.
5.1. Defend the Liberal Arts
In Section 2, we saw that employers seek graduates who can read, write, and think. But those same
employers surveyed by the Conference Board consistently rank the “humanities” as the least important
skill-set for college-graduated employees—thus exacerbating the marginalization and defunding of
humanities on college campuses. College students, too, increasingly avoid the humanities and pure
sciences, recognizing the still-required GenEd courses in these liberal arts as things to “get out of the
way,” hoops to jump through (Arum & Roksa 2011: 74). But as Arum and Roksa unsurprisingly find,
liberal-arts majors perform best on value-added written-communication tests such as the CLA, while
pre-professional students, especially business students, perform worst. (Arum and Roksa 2011: 104109). We have, in other words, a bitter irony: many students and employers deride the liberal arts,
23
●
Mini-Review
Loren Pope
Colleges That Change Lives. New York: Penguin,
2006.
Colleges That Change Lives provides an engaging tour
through institutions committed to undergraduate
student learning. Pope highlights small liberal-arts
colleges—he goes so far as to disparage any institute
of higher learning with more than 5,000 students.
Comparing these small undergraduate colleges to the
Ivies, he perhaps unsurprisingly discovers a stronger
sense of community and more hands-on education at
the forty “colleges that change lives.” Pope makes a
point of focusing on unselective liberal-arts colleges—
institutions which accept B students and transform
them into scientists, medical doctors, artists, leaders.
Mid-size or large state universities, while equally
unselective, could not possibly implement many of
the practices of these small colleges. Although places
such as Hiram or St. Johns or Ursinus don’t require
incoming freshmen to have good high-school grades,
they do require the sort of strong commitment to the
academic project so signally lacking among many
incoming students at non-elite public universities.
Nevertheless these larger institutions can and should
learn much from Pope’s case-studies. For example,
they could give more encouragement to study
abroad, as many of Pope’s colleges do; and advocates
of the Writing Across the Curriculum program could
look for inspiration to Pope’s numerous examples of
incoming C students blossoming through frequent,
lengthy, rigorous writing assignments (210 and
passim.).
Note: For another survey of schools promoting
rigorous, enriching, well-supported student learning,
but emphasizing mid-sized to large institutions, see
Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That
Matter (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt 2010).
blissfully ignorant that it is in these very liberal arts that the
written communication and critical thinking sought for by
employers are best cultivated. (This instrumental argument
may not be the best defense of the liberal arts, but it may be the
defense best understood by administrators).
5.2. Limit Class Sizes
Books such as Engaging Large Classes (Stanley & Porter 2002)
provide practical steps for making large classes work—but it
might be noted that many of these amount to rendering the
large class effectively small through group discussion,
problem-solving teams, and other “lecture-flipping” techniques.
Largely unaddressed in this otherwise useful volume—should
one teach large classes at all? Individual teachers have little
choice on this matter, but departments and faculty associations
should actively defend small classes.
The quantitative data on this question is still sparse;
nevertheless, some data do indicate that students learn better
in smaller classes. Students who took large introductory
classes fared worse in subsequent classes in the division than
did students whose introductory classes were small (Chapman
& Ludlow 2010; see Mini-Review at p. 10 for a possible
explanation of this finding). The disadvantage for students
from larger classes was especially pronounced at the lower end
of the grade-scale; that is, well-prepared students perform well
in classes of any size, but struggling students get lost in big
classes (Toth & Montagna 2002: 256): accordingly, the current
system of rewarding honors students with small classes while
throwing at-risk students into large lectures should be
reversed. In general, large classes seem to work as well as
small classes for the imparting of content, but small classes are
more effective at everything else: “the application of [content]
to new situations, retention of information, problem solving,
critical thinking” (Toth & Montagna 2002: 254). Since
everyone from Arum and Roksa to the employers canvassed by
the Conference Board consider critical thinking, problem
solving, and application more important than content, small
classes seem to be indicated.
I argued in section 3.2 above that the difficulties involved in
measuring the “added value” of informal class discussion
indicate problems with quantification, not with discussion
itself. Similarly, the utility of small classes can best be defended
on qualitative grounds. As Andrew Delbanco argues, the small
24
class “helps students learn how to qualify their initial responses to hard questions. It can help them to
learn the difference between informed insight and mere opinionating. It can provide the pleasurable
chastisement of discovering that others see the world differently…” (Delbanco 2012b: 57-58). Delbanco
tells the moving anecdote of a student from mainland China, schooled in an academic culture where
every question had a “standard correct answer,” who blossomed in a first-year seminar at Bowdoin
College. For the first time he found himself allowed to “question the ‘prescribed answer,’” to examine for
himself all doctrine, however ancient or honored—and to disagree with his teacher and classmates
(Delbanco 2012a; 2012b: 56-57).
This reads like a Cold War parable: an oppressed socialist discovering free
inquiry in the Free World. But as Delbanco makes plain, the story’s point is
quite the reverse. Too many American college students will never have this
powerful experience that the foreign student found so liberating, because most
students don’t go to Bowdoin and rarely engage in small-class seminars. By the
time students get into small specialist classes in their junior or senior year,
habits of indifferent silence have often solidified—so small classes are especially
important at the first-year and introductory level (where they are currently
most rare). Not every class can be small, and perhaps some shouldn’t be: but
without wide student access to small classes something precious about
American education has been lost.
●
●
Small-class discussion
“helps students learn how to
qualify their initial
responses to hard questions”
and “provides the
pleasurable chastisement of
discovering that others see
the world differently”
●
●
5.3. Encourage Innovative Teaching
It takes courage to try something really new in our classrooms. It might not work. It might work really
well, but not the first time. It might be a great idea but students still don’t like it: as we’ve seen above in
reference for example to the “flipped” classroom, many students have little interest in exciting,
innovative, or engaged pedagogy, preferring a straightforward class with a clearly marked procedure for
passing the test.
Innovative teaching can be encouraged in a number of ways. A student-evaluation “vacation” can allow
teachers to experiment with new techniques, freed from the potentially paralyzing worry that negative
SETs will go into their permanent records. Awards for teaching excellence can advertise the importance
of good teaching. However, as Rhode notes, awards honor the extraordinary few. In the long term,
“other forms of recognition for the many faculty who provide consistently excellent teaching but who
will not receive one of the few awards available” can provide stronger incentives with a wider impact
than can awards on their own. Such recognition might include “release time and appropriate course
credit for collaborative teaching, service learning, and other innovative projects” (Rhode 2006: 84-85; cf.
Evans 2005).
We can also open our doors (both physically and metaphorically). Parker Palmer advocates an “opendoor teaching community that goes well beyond the formal, scheduled “peer review.” Instead, colleagues
wander into each other’s classes more or less at will, observing and commenting on each other’s
teaching in an atmosphere de-coupled from concerns over performance review or promotion. Palmer
suggests that we should also gather regularly to share and discuss our syllabi, our assignments, our
strategies, but also our disappointments and perplexities: teaching moments when we were stumped or
confused. Colleagues can offer advice but, perhaps more importantly, can simply listen supportively as
we work out the implications of a difficult teaching moment for ourselves (Palmer 1998: 141-156). Such
25
●
●
a culture of open-door teaching could easily be implemented at the program or departmental level: with
some political will, it could also be instituted university-wide. And the small collegial mutually
mentoring groups Palmer describes could be facilitated by departments, by teaching resource centers, or
by grassroots movements such as the Teaching and Learning Collective at CMU.
5.4. Reward Rigorous Teaching
Steven Brint has suggested that “active learning” has made classrooms more interesting but not more
challenging. It has brought more appreciation for diversity and service learning to college students, but
has not added new rigor. “Student-centered, active-learning, and community-engagement” styles of
teaching can be rigorous, of course: Brint’s point is that, in the face of “the consumerism and
utilitarianism of college student life,” they usually have not been rigorous in practice (Brint 2009; quoted
after Arum & Roksa 2011: 132). The classroom should be innovative, exciting and engaging: but it must
be rigorous.
●
●
●
Student-centered, activelearning, and
community-engagement
styles of teaching can be
rigorous. But faced with
the consumerism and
utilitarianism of college
student life, they usually
have not been rigorous in
practice
●
●
●
According to Arum and Roksa, after adjusting for a number of individual and
institutional differences, high faculty expectations accounted for a 27-point
increase in CLA scores—the single strongest correlation between instructor
behavior and CLA improvement (Arum & Roksa 2011: 93-94). The other major
variable in CLA scores is also a direct measure of rigorous workload: students
taking courses requiring at least 40 pages of reading per week and at least 20
pages of writing over the semester (ibid.). High expectations need not necessarily
result in low grades: assignments such as those advocated by Bain, in which
teachers require multiple drafts of written work before it is submitted for a final
grade, combine high expectations with the high final grades typical in graduate
school (Bain 2004). Such a labor-intensive practice depends on institutional
incentives and structures—an adjunct teaching a 5/5 load without GA support
can’t possibly mark multiple drafts. And rigor combined with high grades also
presupposes a motivated student culture. At a typical open-enrollment institution,
high expectations will at least initially correlate with student resistance: a high
drop-rate, low SET, and comparatively low student GPA. Rigorous teachers must
not be penalized for such an initial student reaction.
“Studying and doing homework has stronger and more widespread effects [on a range of academic,
cognitive, and affective outcomes in higher education] than almost any other involvement or
environmental measure” (Astin 1993: 376; quoted after Arum & Roksa 2011: 99). But such studying on
our students’ part requires feedback and grading from teachers, and this rigorous teaching is laborintensive and potentially unpopular (Arum & Roksa 2011: 9; and see Massy & Zemsky 1994). We can’t
be rigorous on our own. Many students migrate away from difficult or heavy-workload courses,
effectually punishing teachers who enforce high expectations. Rigor must be established at the
departmental level, or the hard teachers will suffer low-course enrollments and feel pressure to ease up
(Benton 2011). Similarly, high reading/writing requirements, if not coupled to smaller class-sizes,
reduced teaching load, or the provision of TAs, will be adopted only by the most committed teachers.
26
5.5. Cautiously Engage the Assessment Movement
As noted near the beginning of this guide, Arum and Roksa consider “discussion of higher education’s
accountability both largely inevitable and in certain respects warranted” (Arum & Roksa 2011: 18-19).
Assessment seems inevitable, but departments and faculty associations can have some influence on what
gets measured and on the uses to which such measurements are put. At worst, such influence might help
American colleges avoid the tragic consequences of assessment currently undermining British education
(see Section 3.2 above). At best, we might turn assessment to the advantage of good teaching. Much
depends on the assessment tool: not all of which are created equal.
In 2006 the Spellings Commission failed in its original intent to adopt the Collegiate Learning
Assessment as a national assessment of college learning (Field 2006a). Worries about such a
standardized assessment were (and are) both serious and legitimate. Many feared a “No Child Left
Behind” model for universities, a fear strengthened in that Texas tycoon Charles Miller, who chaired the
Spellings Commission, was also an architect of NCLB and of the test-based University of Texas
accountability regime (Brooks 2012; Field 2006b). More generally, teachers worried that such an
assessment reinforced models of education under which “students are consumers, and […] the product
they purchase can be evaluated by mandatory standardized tests” (Katz 2008).
Largely in response to the Spelling Commission, a consortium of more than 300 public colleges and
universities formed the Voluntary System of Accountability, using the CLA and other measures to
provide transparency about the learning taking place on their campuses (Glenn 2010b; and see
www.voluntarysystem.org/). Perhaps because the CLA is an open-ended, qualitative, written test (see
Figure 5.1), results of this voluntary assessment regime have been surprisingly positive (For a
comprehensive evaluation of the validity of the CLA,
see Klein, Benjamin, Shavelson, & Bolus 2007).
Similarly, when it was administered to 7,500 students
in 47 small liberal-arts colleges as part of a study by
Figure 5.1
the Council of Independent Colleges, several used the
The CLA Performance Task
results as a basis for workshops on writing and
Complete the following task in 90 minutes
critical thinking pedagogy, or to revise weaknesses in
Scenario: You are the assistant to a provost who wants to measure
their curricula in these areas (Berrett 2011).
Indeed “Teaching to the test” in the case of the CLA
might actually be a good idea. Faculty involved in the
CIC study used the open-ended questions from the
CLA in their classrooms, as models of real-world
problems requiring critical thinking. The University
of Evansville uses “retired” CLA performance-tasks
in its first-year-experience classes, while the
psychology department at Pacific Lutheran
University has begun incorporating disciplinespecific CLA type performance tasks into its capstone
course (Berrett 2011; Glenn 2010a, 2010b). Although
one might pause here to wonder what sorts of inclass questions and final exams these schools were
employing before the CLA came along, the point is
clear—teaching to the CLA would not resemble
27
the quality of your university's general-education program. Your boss
is considering adopting the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a
national test that asks students to demonstrate their ability to
synthesize evidence and write persuasively.
Sources: Graphs of CLA scores from the University of Texas over a
four-year period;
An essay in which an assistant provost at a flagship campus describes
her ‘grave concerns’ about using CLA scores to compare different
colleges;
A report in which the CLA’s creators reply to their critics.
Task: Write a two-page memorandum to your provost, describing and
analyzing the major arguments for and against adopting the CLA and
recommending a choice for or against.
Adapted from Glenn 2010b.
teaching to the SAT or the GRE. Klein and his colleagues offer an illuminating hypothetical: “if college
instructors trained students to work through CLA tasks, they would be teaching the kind of critical
thinking, analytic reasoning, and communication skills their colleges’ mission statements say they are
teaching” (Klein, et al. 2007: 430)
It hasn’t been my intention in this section to shill for the CLA. Rather, I have wanted to argue that
pressures to demonstrate the achievement of learning outcomes are not likely to go away, and some sort
of assessment regime seems inevitable whether at the university, state, or national level. Faculty and
departments should work hard to ensure that that assessment looks more like the CLA than like the
GRE (or SET scores, or NSSE satisfaction benchmarks, or graduation rates, completion rates, etc.).
5.6. Practice “Skeptical Curiosity”
“Sage on the stage” or “guide on the side?” (King 1993). Teaching paradigm or learning paradigm?
Authority or facilitator? Droning monologue or “flipped” classroom? Plugged in to every possible
electronic device, or alone in a room with paper and pen (or maybe parchment and quill)? Chalk or
cheese? (Ostling and Vernon 2012). These are false dichotomies. Many of the authors writing about
education today seem not to have gained that finest fruit of a true education, the ability to
“accommodate uncertainty, paradox, and the demands of greater complexity;” to inhabit the grey areas
(L. Lee Knefelkamp, quoted in Delbanco 2012b: 46).
●
●
●
Sage on the stage or guide
on the side? Teaching or
learning? Authority or
facilitator? Chalk or cheese?
These are false dichotomies.
●
●
●
A good teaching institution would adopt any teaching tool that works, and
would embrace a diversity of teaching and learning approaches. Surveying the
teaching trends outlined in this essay, one finds a pattern in the consistent
emphasis on certain types of approach over others, despite the evident utility of
many approaches for different teaching tasks and goals.
Consider, for example, the five features of an excellent undergraduate institution
as developed by Kuh and his colleagues. These are: “(1) level of academic
challenge, (2) active and collaborative learning, (3) student-faculty interaction,
(4) supportive campus environment, and (5) enriching educational experiences”
(Kuh, et al. 2010: 174)
Most would agree that these are all goods. But items 2, 4, 5 can more easily be implemented (or be seen
to be implemented) through the promotion of centers for teaching excellence, student resource centers
(writing centers, math centers, tutoring centers), and enrichment programs such as Study Abroad and
Alternative Breaks. In contrast, item 1 (maintaining a high level of academic challenge) potentially
interferes with other institutional goals such as retention, graduation rates, or student satisfaction. Item
3, student-faculty interaction, is expensive: to become a standard feature of large public universities
rather than the incidental activity of heroic teachers, heightened student/faculty interaction would
require a smaller student/faculty ratio, smaller class-sizes, and reduced teaching loads—and these cost
money.
In other words, it is institutionally easiest to promote active learning while honoring academic
challenge largely in the breach. This does not mean that the two are incompatible. However, a
perception that they compete against each other can be encouraged by institutional conditions in such a
way that those who strive for academic rigor can, unfortunately, look down their noses at “active and
28
collaborative learning;” while active teachers can
perceive rigorists as elite or out of touch. Such
perceptions are particularly unfortunate, in that Kuh
and his colleagues emphasize that the five features
discussed are mutually interdependent. A school
featuring high levels of active learning will not
promote much in the way of real learning if this is
not bolstered by high expectations; and rigor without
active engagement is dull rote work.
Note the almost comically commonsense character of
many of Arum and Roksa’s findings: what I like to
call their “duh” factor:
 “When faculty have high expectations and expect
students to read and write reasonable amounts,
students learn more” (Arum & Roksa 2011: 119).
Duh!
 “Given that students are spending very little time
studying or attending classes, in both absolute and
relative terms, we should not be surprised that
they are not learning much” (98). Duh!
 “When students are asked to read and write in
their courses, when academic coursework is
challenging, and when higher-order thinking is
included in coursework, students perform better
on tests measuring skills such as critical thinking
and writing” (93). Duh!
 “Requiring that students attend to their class
work has the potential to shape their actions in
ways that are conducive to their intellectual
development” (119). Duh!
Figure 5.2
Raising Academic Standards
Students should expect to engage in academic work for at least two
hours outside class for every one contact hour in class.
Students who carry full course loads should consider their academic
life to be their primary focus and responsibility. Other activities—
including employment and socializing—should be considered
secondary.
Departments will be adequately staffed with full-time, regular faculty
members, who by the nature of their appointment will have a longterm interest in the institution and the capacity to hold high
expectations for student performance. The university’s reliance on
part-time and temporary faculty should be examined annually.
Academic administrators will support faculty rigor in holding high
expectations for student performance. Reliance on [SET] as the major
determinant of teaching effectiveness should be reduced, and
multiple measures of teaching effectiveness should be encouraged.
Academic administrators will strive to create an academic
environment that allows faculty to hold high expectations for student
performance. Teaching loads and class sizes should be designed to
encourage enhanced faculty-student learning and interaction.
Teaching and teaching-related activities that promote high
expectations for student performance should be given prominence in
the evaluation of faculty.
A commitment to high academic quality should drive the fiscal
priorities of the institution.
Abridged from the CMU Academic Senate “Draft Principles for Raising
Academic Standards,” October 26, 2001.
This isn’t rocket science. Though backed up with
voluminous statistics, most of it is plain common sense (and most of it is anticipated in the Academic
Standards drafted over a decade ago at CMU: see Figure 5.2). So why has Arum and Roksa’s work
provoked such consternation and resistance?
The answer, one suspects, relates to money—to how and on what money ought to be spent. Some good
teaching of content can be achieved in large classes through various active or collaborative
approaches—peer teaching, “flipping” the classroom, and so on. But the equally important gains in
critical thinking and complex reasoning can only be accomplished through a high incidence of student
labor outside the classroom—lots of reading, lots of writing, lots of problem-sets. And this can only be
accomplished by teachers provided with the institutional support for high expectations. Students given
lots of writing assignments will learn to write better, but only if many of these assignments are held to
high standards and receive extensive feedback. This in turn requires some combination of low-courseload, small classes, and/or a cohort of well-trained, motivated GAs. As Murray Sperber argues, “the
29
●
●
●
unavoidable fact remains that teaching undergraduates in a conscientious
manner is very labor-intensive” (Sperber 2005: 138). And also expensive.
“The unavoidable fact
remains that teaching
undergraduates in a
conscientious manner is
very labor intensive.”
Moreover, prioritizing such teaching is not likely to increase a college’s
standings in the US News and World Report: in fact it is likely to reduce that
standing, since rigor can lead to lower graduation rates. In contrast, elaborate
student services, prestigious research, or a fancy athletic center, though equally
expensive, will have such a positive effect on university rankings (Rhode 2006:
8). Teachers and concerned students might appreciate the conclusions of a 2001
● ● ●
RAND Corporation study of university investment choices: “A college may
make large investments, often placing tremendous strain on its financial health,
yet neglect the needs of undergraduate students and other ‘customers’ … who don’t contribute to its
prestige” (quoted in Confessore 2003). In such a rankings regime, teaching loses out.
Of course, university administrators do consistently invoke the language of teaching excellence and
active learning. Too often, however, improved learning outcomes are correlated with greater
administrative oversight and control. Thus a recent Chronicle article about improving teaching
effectiveness begins by briefly outlining the usual difficulty—faculty are esteemed and rewarded by their
peers on the basis of research and publication, not for good teaching—but moves quickly to criticism of
a “faculty culture” that values autonomy in the classroom and resists centrally administered assessment
of and control over teaching efficacy. Careful readers might note a tell-tale shift: research is evaluated by
one’s peers in a department and in the field, while teaching—it seems to be assumed—is best evaluated
by administrators or their highly paid expert consultants (Wilson 2010). Similarly, Derek Bok
complains that “research universities rarely insist on the best possible teaching or make a substantial
and systematic effort to improve the quality of their educational programs” (Bok 2003: 160). One can
agree fully with Bok’s sour comment while worrying about possible implications: who, within the
university, should spearhead such a “substantial systematic effort” toward teaching quality? Professors
are rightfully leery of administrative attempts to interfere with research priorities. Faculty, not
administrators (or students, or the public) must remain the arbiters of good research. Is teaching
different? Should we acquiesce to centrally imposed teaching criteria—criteria which, despite their
inevitable packaging as “research-based best practices” might all too often be the product of the latest
jargon-fuelled fad, or worse? Too often, the rhetoric of improved learning turns out to be a thinly
rationalized wedge by which administrators or legislators work toward goals ulterior to teaching
excellence—cost savings, “disruption,” improved graduation rates (Jenkins 2013). Any systematic push
for better teaching must be a collaborative project, a product of shared governance in which teachers
and concerned students have a central voice.
6. What Now?
Many accounts of teaching trends suffer from the “A Box Fallacy” (Birnbaum 2001: 174-177; and see
Figure 6.1, next page). They disproportionately report examples of an approach’s success (Box A), and
contrast these with examples of failure where the approach was not adopted (Box D). Neglected in such
accounts are two further categories: unsuccessful attempts to adopt the approach (C), and successful
teaching without the approach (B). This last category, though severely under-reported, is in some ways
30
the most interesting: it provides evidence that
teaching is a pluralistic craft—that there are many
paths up the mountain of learning.
To combat this fallacy, more data on a wide range of
teaching approaches is helpful, of course, and Sections
3-4 of this essay attempt to survey many such
approaches. But here too, one must resist the urge to
reduce good teaching to a checklist of “best
practices”—any practice is only as good as its fit with
a given teacher’s own style, a given student-body’s
own predispositions, a course’s goals. Such styles,
predispositions, and goals are and should be diverse.
Teaching approaches and techniques should
encompass similar diversity.
Figure 6.1
The A-Box Fallacy
Successful
Unsuccessful
Approach adopted
A
C
Approach
not adopted
B
D
Adapted from Birnbaum 2001 p. 176
Consider the example of Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist whose experimental teaching
methods—flipping the lecture, using collaborative Google Docs, having students make videos, teaching
with Twitter—have garnered national attention and “Teacher of the Year” awards. In interviews and
workshops, Wesch advocated his tech-heavy approach and disparaged “talk and chalk” teaching as
obsolete. But as a recent Chronicle article details, Wesch has come to realize that his methods often
didn’t work for colleagues, and that the intangibles of teaching—passion, a sense of purpose, above all a
connection with the students—are more important than any specific teaching approach (Young 2012b).
He was impressed by the work of Christopher Sorensen, an “old fogy” colleague whom students love,
and who has also won teaching awards despite the traditional lecture format of his classes. Wesch came
to conclude that students can always “sniff out an inauthentic place of learning,” no matter how
innovative or traditional; they will also always respond to a teacher who strives for connection and
instills a sense of wonder.
I recount this anecdote to make two concluding points:
First, students loved Wesch’s course, found it stimulating, exciting, engaging, at least in part because it
was different from their other courses. Imagine if every course were run on similar lines—the approach,
excellent though it may be, would get old fast. Just as Kant’s categorical imperative runs into trouble
when going to the beach (if it were a universal maxim to go to the beach, everyone would go and it
would be no fun: we enjoy going to the beach only when few others are doing the same) so too with
innovative teaching approaches. At least part of their appeal derives from their novelty, the break they
offer from “ordinary” approaches. More is not always better.
Second, and centrally: Wesch stopped proselytizing his lecture-flipping approach after he realized that
the key to its success lay less in his specific technique than in his own excitement about and
commitment to that technique. The point made here is eloquently argued in Parker Palmer’s Courage to
Teach. Palmer recalls his own favorite professor from his undergraduate days: a stereotypical “sage on
the stage” whose monologous lectures broke every supposed rule of learner-centered teaching models—
no active learning, no group work, no discussion, no writing to learn. Palmer himself would never teach
this way, but it worked wonderfully for that professor and his students, who were powerfully moved by
the passion and intelligence of his lectures. Accordingly, Palmer argues, it is more important to find and
use the techniques appropriate to one’s own personality: no formula for good teaching can be effective
31
Mini-Review
Parker J. Palmer
The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
The Courage to Teach argues a radical thesis: “Good teaching
comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher” (Palmer
1998: 10) Not every reader will be entirely comfortable with
Palmer’s insistence that good teaching requires emotional
and spiritual maturity in addition to intellectual acumen;
some, too, will be disappointed in his disinclination to provide
specific teaching tips, tools, and techniques. At worst, Palmer
sometimes comes close to asserting that good teachers must
be good people—grounded, strong, at home in their skins—a
frightening notion for the less evolved among us. Yet
Palmer’s point is not that there is one correct good teaching
personality, but that each teacher must find the approaches
that “reveal rather than conceal the [various, diverse kinds
of] personhood from which good teaching comes” (Palmer:
24).
except insofar as it fits the teacher. Both Palmer and his
teacher place the subject at the center of their teaching,
and try to bring it to life for their students, but there is
otherwise nothing similar to their teaching—no shared
technique (Palmer 1998: 22 135-137). Lecture (or
discussion, or even PowerPoint) works for a particular
teacher because it is theirs: it is appropriate to what
Palmer calls the teacher’s “integrity.” There are many
paths up the mountain: each teacher must find the path
most appropriate to their own personality and ability. I
hope this “guide for the perturbed” has provided a few
path-markers, a few pointers, a few warning signs. But I
especially hope it has helped colleagues realize that their
own path to teaching excellence is a good one, insofar as
they have the courage to pursue it conscientiously and
with passion.
Palmer seeks to transcend what he (I think correctly) sees as
an overdrawn dichotomy in current scholarship between
“teacher-centered” and “learner-centered” approaches. He
finds middle ground in a “subject-centered” approach
designed to explore “a subject that transcends our selfabsorption and refuses to be reduced to our claims about it”
(Palmer 1998: 116-117). This approach, Palmer convincingly
argues, avoids the authoritarianism of the teacher and the
potential relativism of learner approaches, uniting all
members of a class in a collaborative “community of truth.”
In one real-life case-study, medical students encounter a real
patient with a real illness on their first day, and gear part of
their course-work to diagnosis and treatment of this actual
case. As predicted, bedside manner and medical ethics
improved. But surprisingly, standardized test scores also
improved. Directly engaged with a specific, real subject,
students cared more about their studies, studied harder, and
learned more.
Despite Palmer’s dismissal of technique, this book bursts with
good suggestions through which teachers can explore and
develop their own courage to teach well.
32
7. References and Resources
References are listed thematically, under the section where a given source was discussed. Occasionally, I
mention a source early in the report but discuss it more fully in a later section: in such cases crossreferencing will guide the reader to the full reference in the relevant section.
1. What’s Going On?
Twenge, J. M. (2006). Generation Me: Why
Today's Young Americans Are More Confident,
Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than
Ever Before. New York: Free Press.
Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically
Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. For
reviews and further discussion, see
http://highered.ssrc.org/
Vyse, D. d. (2012, March 14). Trying to Assess
Learning Gives Colleges Their Own Test
Anxiety, Washington Post.
www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/
trying-to-assess-learning-gives-collegestheir-own-testanxiety/2012/02/24/gIQAyLrtCS_story_1.
html
Bauerlein, M. (2008). See Section 3 below.
Benton, T. H. (2011, Feb. 20 and April 2). A
Perfect Storm in Higher Education, Chronicle
of Higher Education.
chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Stormin/126451/
Birnbaum, R. (2001). See Section 3 below.
2. What is College For?
Casner-Lotto, J., Barrington, L., & Wright, M.
(2006). See Section 2 below.
AAC&U (2013). It Takes More than a Major:
Employer Priorities for College Learning
and Student Success.
www.aacu.org/leap/presidentstrust/compac
t/2013SurveySummary.cfm .
Cowan, B. (2011). See Section 3 below.
Delbanco, A. (2012a). See Section 2 below.
Deresiewicz, W. (2011, May 4). Faulty Towers:
The Crisis in Higher Education, The Nation.
www.thenation.com/article/160410/faultytowers-crisis-higher-education#
Arum, R., Cho, E., Kim, J., & Roksa, J. (2012).
Documenting Uncertain Times:
Postgraduate Transitions of the Academically
Adrift Cohort. New York: Social Science
Research Council.
www.ssrc.org/publications/view/FCFB0E8
6-B346-E111-B2A8-001CC477EC84/
Fish, S. (2008). See Section 2 below.
Gillen, A. (2010, June 16). The Amazing
College Debt Bubble.
www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/201
0/09/the_amazing_college_debt_bubbl.html
Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). See Section 1
above.
Hargittai, E. (2010). See Section 3 below.
Attewell: (2011). Riddle Remains in
Academically Adrift. Society, 48, 225-226.
Hoover, E. (2009). See Section 3 below.
Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millenials
Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York:
Vintage.
Bauerlein, M. (2012, April 16). Fleeting
Attention Shortchanges the Art of Patience.
Chronicle of Higher Education.
chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/mediaspeed-the-wallingham-letter-vertigolavventura/45821
Nathan, R. (2006). My Freshman Year: What a
Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. New
York: Penguin.
Casner-Lotto, J., Barrington, L., & Wright, M.
(2006). Are They Really Ready to Work?
Employers' Perspectives on the Basic
Knowledge and Applied Skills of New
Entrants to the 21st Century U.S.
Rhode, D. L. (2006). See Section 2 below.
Tanner, R. (2011). See Section 3 below.
33
Berrett, D. (2012a, February 19). How
'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the
Traditional Lecture, Chronicle of Higher
Education. chronicle.com/article/HowFlipping-the-Classroom/130857/
Workforce. The Conference Board.
www.p21.org/storage/documents/FINAL_
REPORT_PDF09-29-06.pdf
Delbanco, A. (2012a, February 26). College at
Risk, Chronicle of Higher Education.
chronicle.com/article/College-atRisk/130893/
Berrett, D. (2012b, April 30). New Book Lists
'Best' Professors, but Skeptics Question Its
Methods, Chronicle of Higher Education.
chronicle.com/article/New-Book-ListsBest/131422/
Delbanco, A. (2012b). College: What It Was, Is,
and Should Be. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Birnbaum, R. (2001). Management Fads in
Higher Education: Where They Come From,
What They Do, Why They Fail. San Francisco:
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Acknowledgements
Teaching Trends grows out of
conversations over two years with a
wonderful group of committed pedagogues
and cautious innovators: the Teaching and
Learning Collective at Central Michigan
University. I should like especially to thank
Cristen Vernon, with whom I collaborated
on several projects based on Arum and
Roksa’s Academically Adrift (discerning
readers will find traces of that original focus
throughout the guide). Thanks are due as
well to Allegra Blake, Clint Burhans III,
Jack Drolet, Lauren Griffith, Merlyn
Mowrey, Deb Poole, and Marcy Taylor.
Rob Noggle and David Smith of the CMU
Philosophy and Religion Department
commissioned the research that led to this
guide, which I dedicate to the members of
the CMU student group Learning Roots:
you are the reason we teach and our hope
for a revitalized higher education.
In the years 2008-2012, Michael Ostling taught
courses in World Religions, Mythology,
Christianity, Witchcraft and related subjects in
the Department of Philosophy and Religion,
Central Michigan University. He is currently a
Research Fellow at the Centre for the History
of European Discourses, University of
Queensland, where he studies the history of
fairies, demons, and goblins.
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